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chapter two Abolitionist Britannia and the Blackface Supplicant Slave The nations not so blest as thee Shall in their turns to tyrants fall; While thou shalt flourish great and free, The dread and envy of them all Rule, Britannia! Britannia rule the waves: Britons never will be slaves. —James Thompson, “Rule Britannia” (1740) James Thompson’s “Rule Britannia,” a poem glorifying empire, militarism, and commerce, was set to music and turned into a nationalistic anthem by Thomas Augustine Arne in 1740. The anthem took on new antislavery resonance in 1807 as Great Britain abolished the slave trade and fought Napoleon. Artists, abolitionists , pamphleteers, and thespians proudly celebrated slave-trade abolition as evidence of Britannia’s commitment to liberty in language and images that had their origins in the American, French, and Haitian revolutions. Cultural interlocutors had first begun figuratively associating Britannia with antislavery in the late 1760s as a rebuttal of the American colonists’ ire at Great Britain’s “tyranny” and political “enslavement.” Their popular reworking of the idea of British “liberty ” undergirded the establishment of the London Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade in 1787 and the first parliamentary abolition petition of 1789. After a lull in antislavery momentum in the repressive anti-Jacobin milieu of the 1790s, which associated abolitionism with the violent excesses of the French and Haitian revolutions, Britons resuscitated abolitionist Britannia in the early nineteenth century. This new version was predicated on the boast of a “great and free” nation opposing the tyrant Napoleon, who had reinstated slavery in the French colonies in 1802. When the slave-trade abolition bill passed in 1807, Britons touted the national icon as unequivocally abolitionist. Architects built monuments and sculptures to Britannia’s emancipation of her slaves in her Temple of Liberty. Poets extolled Britannia’s glorious decree in jubilant verses. Artists Abolitionist Britannia and the Blackface Supplicant Slave 53 rendered Britannia freeing her supplicant slaves. And in Furibond; or, Harlequin Negro, according to the stage directions, the “figure of Britannia with her lion descend[ed] from the Skies” and, carrying a writ of law abolishing the slave trade, heralded Britain’s “blest decree, that gives the Negro Liberty.”1 This chauvinistic boast about British liberty came in the aftermath of defeat in the American war, a war that provoked great anxiety in Britons about racial, national, and imperial identity. The American revolutionary war had divided Britons , some of whom deplored it as an “unhappy and unnatural” civil war with “our friends, our brethren,” as the London Evening Post reported.2 The war triggered anxiety over the meaning of subjecthood—were the Americans fellow Britons or subject peoples?—and over larger questions about British imperial expansion, such as the acquisitions made by the East India Company or the incorporation into the empire of French Canadian Catholics.3 American independence nonetheless highlighted stark contrasts between many Britons’ ideas of cultural, ethnic , and political sovereignty and the nascent nationalist identity embraced by their cousins in North America. After the loss of the American colonies, one conduit into which Londoners channeled this angst over the “civil war” with America was a chauvinistic reclamation of British liberty, which tapped into “a culture of patriotism,” albeit one in which many Britons had considerable unease about imperial identity. In contrast to the American transformation of Columbia from an emancipationist to an exclusionary symbol, Britons performed Britannia as triumphantly abolitionist, with slave-trade abolition serving as a potent signifier for British liberty. Yet, like Columbia’s slave-trade abolition bill, Britannia’s “blest decree” freed no slaves. Pantomimes like Furibond, as well as images, songs, and cartoons featuring theatrical characters, played a key role in reconciling the continued practice of chattel slavery in Great Britain’s Caribbean colonies with Britannia’s putative liberty . Artists, poets, and thespians performed slave-trade abolition as the glorious triumph of the virtuous goddess bestowing liberty on passively grateful slaves. These enactments expunged the slaves’ agency, and hence the slaves themselves, by lionizing a pantheon of white philanthropists as liberal Britannia’s collective representatives. Even as they masked the reality of slavery in the British West Indies, white Britons’ erasure of the slaves in theater and popular culture signified a profound anxiety about empire. Triggered by the need to reinvent national and imperial notions of “Britishness” in the face of imperial defeat in the American war, this anxiety grew out of differing American and British meanings and praxes of liberty and slavery. Slave-trade abolition marked the genesis of...

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