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part one SLAVE-TRADE ABOLITION Pageantry, Parody, and the Goddess of Liberty (1790s–1820s) Transatlantic abolitionist, revolutionary, and pamphleteer Thomas Paine envisaged the origins of republican liberty in a poem first published in the Pennsylvania Magazine in June 1775 under the pseudonym “Atlanticus.” The “Goddess of Liberty,” he enthused, had descended from the heavens in her “chariot of light” and transplanted the “fair budding branch” from the “gardens above” to the “peaceable shores” of America. Once the liberty tree was planted, the “fame of its fruit” drew a fraternity of brothers “unmindful of names of distinctions . . . from the east to the west”to found a democratic, egalitarian republic, for their “Temple was Liberty.” Set to the popular tune of “The Gods of the Greeks,” Paine’s widely reprinted canto used neoclassical imagery to define and promote an American republic founded on the self-evident truths of natural and equal rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, and to advocate the enactment of those rights throughout the Atlantic world. Paine’s lyrics captured not only his utopian vision of the American Revolution but also the democratic precepts that precipitated the first movements to abolish slavery and the slave trade in the Atlantic world, established in Philadelphia in 1775 and in London in 1787. These early antislavery efforts led to the gradual abolition of slavery in Pennsylvania and other northern states in the late eighteenth century and to the abolition of the slave trade by Great Britain in 1807 and the United States in 1808. Paine’s Atlanticus moniker was entirely fitting, because both British and American poets, artists, and playwrights used the shared metaphor of the goddess in her Temple of Liberty to contest the meaning of liberty and slavery during and after the American, French, and Haitian revolutions. On both sides of the Atlantic , slavery was critical to the formation of modern civic identities. Nowhere was this more evident than in revolutionary-era Philadelphia and London, hotbeds of antislavery zeal. In reaction to the slave-trade bans, playwrights, poets, artists, architects , and antislavery advocates in both cities utilized Britannia and Columbia in their Temples of Liberty to reconfigure British and American mythologies of liberty, citizenship, and subjecthood. The theaters of London and Philadelphia 14 Slave-Trade Abolition staged Britannia and Columbia in their Temples of Liberty in allegorical dances, pantomimes, and “transparencies” (backlit, painted set pieces) just as the British and American bans on the slave trade went into effect. Yet the theaters of London and Philadelphia performed their goddesses in Temples of Liberty that excluded blacks from civic rights and benefits. Indeed, not only in theater but also in architecture , art, and poetry, Britannia boasted her national liberty while promoting an imperial ethno-cultural superiority that legitimated continuing colonial slavery. Columbia, meanwhile, had been celebrated by revolutionary-era painters, poets, and abolitionists for her republican values of liberty and equality, with antislavery signification. But when thespians staged the goddess in her temple on the Philadelphia stage in 1808, they fêted her as a symbol of political independence but not of personal abolitionist liberty, a performance that reinforced whiteness and masculinity as the defining qualifications of American citizenship. The popular language and symbols Londoners and Philadelphians used to articulate these contrasting civic constructs and slavery’s place within the polity were not just neoclassical representations of modern civic constructs. Poets, playwrights, and abolitionists also deployed blackface burlesque to negotiate the racialist anxieties about slavery, liberty, and rights unleashed by the American Revolution and the subsequent French and Haitian Revolutions and capped off by renewed hostilities between Great Britain and the United States in the War of 1812. During these revolutionary years, British artists, thespians, poets, and abolitionists used the blackface supplicant slave for mutating and overlapping meanings : as a proto-minstrel blackface clown, as a symbol of xenophobic fears about racial miscegenation (especially after the influx of former American slaves into Great Britain), and as an abolitionist spokesman reconfiguring Britannia’s liberty as antislavery to rebut American accusations of British tyranny. In the early years of the American republic there was a brief utopian moment that seemed to promise the extension of republican “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” to Africans, but by the early nineteenth century, Americans, using British blackface stage characters, created a newly virulent form of racial derogation through blackface cartoons and broadsides that was symptomatic of rescinding the radical revolutionary hope of liberty and rights for African Americans. After slave-trade abolition...

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