The passion of abolitionism: How slave martyrdom obscures slave labor.

摘要

The great movement to abolish slavery began when some believers---namely Protestant ones of the eighteenth-century mission---saw slavery more as a condition of torture than of labor, and symbolized it that way to profound effect. Anglophone missionaries used Christological symbols to expose, first to themselves, then to others, previously unspectacular torture of "Negro" slaves by white Christians. Such torture, appearing homologous to Christ's martyrdom, was no way to treat a pre-Christian people---as the mission came to see "Negro" slaves in toto. Hence, slave abuse was for Britain spiritually precarious, the source of a great national guilt requiring salvational cleansing, known in its worldly form as "abolition." The more these Christians described slavery in such terms, the more their symbolism caught on with others, and the more "slavery" was identified in the popular mind with the sin of "Negro" abuse. This had the salutary effect of clarifying a definition of "slavery," of giving an undiluted name to an historical case of awesome suffering: that of abused Africans during the British colonial and American antebellum periods. However, this clarifying of popular discourse also had the effect of obscuring the labor side of slavery, of disengaging the labor question. "Antislavery," in sermons, essays, poems, and songs, was a rhetoric of emancipating those doomed to martyrdom, not of empowering the exploited. This study looks at some of the costs of that disengagement, though not without appreciating the Christian features of popular abolitionism as a great moral discourse.