A West Indian Jubilee in America: British Emancipation and the American Abolition Movement.

摘要

This dissertation, "A West Indian Jubilee in America: British Emancipation and the American Abolition Movement," charts the impact of British Emancipation on American abolitionism and free African-American communities from the 1830s through the 1860s. On August 1,1834 the British Abolition Act freed by proclamation 800,000 slaves in the West Indies. In the coming decades, in print and in public rituals, the success of the former slaves in the British West Indies became a crucial focal point in the debate on American slavery. This debate took place in the flourishing American print culture that emerged in the 1830s: antislavery newspapers, tracts, books, printed speeches, broadsides, personal letters and other print ephemera. Using personal accounts and collected data, American abolitionists argued that the emancipated British West Indies served as a successful experiment of free versus slave labor that Southern slaveholders could emulate. American reformers toured the emancipated West Indian colonies to determine whether emancipation had improved the morality of former slaves. Success in the emancipated British West Indies instigated a comparative discourse on race, equality and democratic participation in American society among free African-Americans in the U.S. North. The success of freedom in the British West Indies, abolitionists and free American-Americans contended, foretold the success of freedom in America.