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THE ANTI-CORN LAW LEAGUE AND BRITISH ANTI-SLAVERY IN TRANSATLANTIC PERSPECTIVE, 1838–1846*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 February 2009

SIMON MORGAN
SIMON MORGAN*
Affiliation:
Leeds Metropolitan University
*
School of Cultural Studies, Leeds Metropolitan University, Civic Quarter Campus, Leeds, LS1 3HEs.j.morgan@leedsmet.ac.uk
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Abstract

This article reassesses relations between the free-trade and anti-slavery movements in the mid-nineteenth century. It places well-known controversies over the removal of preferential import duties on free-grown sugar into the context of a broader and more complex relationship, in which the Anti-Corn Law League borrowed many of the tactics pioneered by the abolitionists, while also attempting to assume anti-slavery's mantle of moral reform. In particular, the article situates the campaigns in a transatlantic context complicated by the domestic agendas of American anti-slavery groups and southern cotton growers, both of whom tried to take advantage of the British free-trade movement for their own ends. Finally, it is argued that the apparent success of the League in forcing the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846 not only contributed to the decline of anti-slavery as an effective extra-parliamentary movement, but also ensured that other moral reform campaigns such as the peace movement were forced to adopt the language and tactics of free-trade liberalism to survive, generating a lasting legacy that came to fruition with the emergence of the Gladstonian Liberal Party.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Historical Journal , Volume 52 , Issue 1 , March 2009 , pp. 87 - 107
Copyright
Copyright © 2009 Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

*

The author wishes to acknowledge the helpful comments of Anthony Howe and Alex Tyrrell on earlier drafts of this essay.

References

1 A. Tyrrell, Joseph Sturge and the moral radical party in early Victorian Britain (London, 1987), ch. 7 passim; idem, ‘The “moral radical party” and the Anglo-Jamaican campaign for the abolition of the negro apprenticeship scheme’, English Historical Review, 99 (1984), pp. 481–502; W. A. Green, British slave emancipation: the sugar colonies and the great experiment 1830–1865 (Oxford, 1976), pp. 151–61.

2 Tyrrell, ‘“Moral radical party”’, p. 499. The view of abolitionism as primarily an elite movement has been successfully challenged in S. Drescher, ‘Public opinion and the destruction of British colonial slavery’, in J. Walvin, ed., Slavery and British society, 1776–1846 (Basingstoke, 1982), pp. 22–48; idem, ‘Whose abolition? Popular pressure and the ending of the British slave trade’, Past and Present, 143 (1994), pp. 136–66; and J. R. Oldfield, Popular politics and British anti-slavery: the mobilisation of public opinion against the slave trade, 1787–1807 (London, 1998).

3 For the anti-Corn Law campaign see N. McCord, The Anti-Corn Law League, 1838–1846 (London, 1958); P. Pickering and A. Tyrrell, The people's bread: a history of the Anti-Corn Law League (Leicester, 2000).

4 Rice, C. D., ‘“Humanity sold for sugar”: the British abolitionist response to free trade in slave-grown sugar’, Historical Journal, 13 (1970), pp. 402–18CrossRefGoogle Scholar; H. Temperley, British anti-slavery, 1833–1870 (Aylesbury, 1972), chs. 7–8 passim.

5 For a suggestion that it did, see H. Temperley, ‘Anti-slavery’, in P. Hollis, ed., Pressure from without in early Victorian England (London, 1974), pp. 27–51, at pp. 46–8.

6 See Spall, R. F., ‘Free trade, foreign relations, and the Anti-Corn Law League’, International History Review, 10 (1988), pp. 405–32CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

7 The links between the League and anti-slavery are long-established in American free-trade historiography, but have been practically ignored by British scholars: T. P. Martin, ‘The upper Mississippi valley in Anglo-American anti-slavery and free trade relations, 1837–1842’, Mississippi Valley Historical Review, 15 (1928), pp. 204–20; idem, ‘Free trade and the Oregon question, 1842–1846’, in A. H. Cole et al., eds., Facts and factors in economic history: articles by former students of Edwin Francis Gay (Cambridge, MA, 1932), pp. 470–91; more recently S. Meardon, ‘From religious revivals to tariff rancor: preaching free trade and protection during the second American party system’, History of Political Economy, 40 (Annual Supplement, 2008), pp. 265–98. See, however, K. Fielden, ‘Richard Cobden and America’ (Ph.D. thesis, Cambridge, 1966), ch. 3 passim.

8 McCord, The Anti-Corn Law League; Pickering and Tyrrell, People's bread.

9 D. G. Hansen, Strained sisterhood: gender and class in the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society (Amherst, 1993), ch. 6 passim; S. Morgan, ‘From domestic economy to political agitation: women and the Anti-Corn Law League, 1839–1846’, in K. Gleadle and S. Richardson, eds., Women in British politics, 1760–1860: the power of the petticoat (Basingstoke, 2000), pp. 115–33, at pp. 124–5, 127–8; Pickering and Tyrrell, People's bread, pp. 126–7, 208–12; Gurney, P., ‘“The sublime of the bazaar”: a moment in the making of a consumer culture in mid-nineteenth-century England’, Journal of Social History, 40 (2006), pp. 385–405CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

10 Quoted in A. Prentice, History of the Anti-Corn Law League (2 vols., 1853: London, 1968), i, p. 75.

11 Cobden to P. A. Taylor, 4 May 1840, printed in R. Garnett, The life of W. J. Fox (London, 1910), pp. 258–9.

12 McCord, Anti-Corn Law League, pp. 87–9, 99–103.

13 B. Hilton, The age of atonement: the influence of Evangelicalism on social and economic thought, 1795–1865 (Oxford, 1988), ch. 2 passim. For Evangelicalism and anti-slavery see R. Anstey, The Atlantic slave trade and British abolition, 1760–1810 (Basingstoke, 1975), ch. 8 passim.

14 For example Cobden to George Combe, 1 Aug. 1846, Cobden papers, British Library, Add. MS 43660, fos. 57–60 (hereafter Cobden papers).

15 Cobden to Charles Pelham Villiers, 6 June 1841, printed in A. Howe, ed., The letters of Richard Cobden (4 vols., Oxford, 2007–), i, pp. 223–4.

16 This paragraph draws on Pickering and Tyrrell, People's bread, chs. 6–7; also Tyrrell, A., ‘“Woman's mission” and pressure group politics’, Bulletin of the John Rylands University Library, 63 (1980), pp. 194–230CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Morgan, ‘From domestic economy to political agitation’.

17 C. Midgley, Women against slavery: the British campaigns, 1780–1870 (London, 1996).

18 Cobden to Duncan McLaren, 13 May 1843, West Sussex Record Office (hereafter WSRO), Cobden papers 71, fos. 16–17.

19 J. H. Bell, British folks and British India fifty years ago: portraits of Joseph Pease and his contemporaries (Manchester, 1891).

20 For repeal movements after 1838, see Temperley, British anti-slavery; Midgley, Women against slavery; D. Turley, The culture of English anti-slavery, 1780–1860 (London, 1991).

21 Temperley, British anti-slavery, ch. 3 passim.

22 A. M. Stoddart, Elizabeth Pease Nichol (London, 1899), pp. 124, 134–5; Prentice, Anti-Corn Law League, i, pp. 197–9.

23 See Tyrrell, Joseph Sturge; C. Hall, Civilizing subjects: metropole and colony in the English imagination, 1830–1867 (Chicago, IL, 2002), chs. 5–6 passim.

24 Anstey, Atlantic slave trade, ch. 9 passim, esp. pp. 233–4.

25 Pickering and Tyrrell, People's bread, pp. 99–102.

26 H. Richard, Memoirs of Joseph Sturge (London, 1864), pp. 270–1; Tyrrell, Joseph Sturge, p. 94.

27 Cobden to Henry Richard, 12 Oct. 1862, Cobden papers, Add. MS 43659, fos. 210–12; Richard, Joseph Sturge, p. 275; Tyrrell, Joseph Sturge, p. 95.

28 Cobden to Sturge, 20 Feb. 1841, reprinted in Howe, ed., Letters of Richard Cobden, i, pp. 214–16.

29 M. Ceadel, The origins of war prevention: the British peace movement and international relations, 1730–1854 (Oxford, 1996); idem, ‘Cobden and peace’, in A. Howe and S. Morgan, eds., Rethinking nineteenth-century liberalism: Richard Cobden bicentenary essays (Aldershot, 2006), pp. 189–207.

30 Tyrrell, A., ‘Making the millennium: the mid-nineteenth-century peace movement’, Historical Journal, 21 (1978), pp. 75–95CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at pp. 90–1.

31 Manchester Times, 31 Oct. 1840; Cobden to Sturge, 31 Oct. and 2 Nov. 1840, Cobden papers, Add. MS 50131, fos. 24–5, 26–7; the latter is reprinted in Howe, ed., Letters of Richard Cobden, i, pp. 206–7.

32 Cobden to Ashworth, 7 and 12 Apr. 1842, in Howe, ed., Letters of Richard Cobden, i, pp. 266–8; Ashworth to Cobden, 14 Apr. 1842, Cobden papers, Add. MS 43653, fos. 19–20.

33 H. Davis, Joshua Leavitt: Evangelical abolitionist (Baton Rouge, LA, and London, 1990), pp. 148–57, 168–70; Martin, ‘Anglo-American anti-slavery and free trade relations’; Meardon, ‘Religious revivals to tariff rancor’; Leavitt to James G. Birney, 19 May and 1 June 1840, printed in D. L. Dumond, ed., Letters of James Gillespie Birney, 1831–1857 (2 vols., Gloucester, MA, 1966), i, pp. 574–5, 580–2.

34 See Fielden, ‘Cobden and America’.

35 Anti-Corn Law Circular (hereafter ACLC), 9 July, 20 Aug., 15 Oct. 1839.

36 ACLC, 30 July 1840; letter excerpted from the Patriot, 20 July 1840.

37 ‘Negro slavery upheld by the Corn Laws’, ACLC, 22 Oct. 1840.

38 ‘Slavery in America upheld by the British Corn Law’, ACLC, 31 Dec. 1840.

39 Account of the deputation in the Manchester City Archive, J. B. Smith papers, MS 923·2 S338, fo. 3.

40 Martin, ‘Anglo-American anti-slavery and free trade relations’, p. 219; Joshua Leavitt, Memorial … praying the adoption of measures to secure an equitable and adequate market for American wheat (Committee on Agriculture in Congress, 1841).

41 Prentice, Anti-Corn Law League, i, p. 241.

42 J. Curtis, America and the Corn Laws (Manchester, 1841).

43 Minutes of the BFASS, Anti-slavery papers, Rhodes House, MSS Brit. Emp. 20 E2/6, fos. 403–5.

44 See, for example, Liberator, 19 May 1843, 26 Jan., 29 Mar., 10 and 17 May 1844.

45 Garrison to Elizabeth Pease, 28 Feb. 1843, in W. M. Merrill, ed., The letters of William Lloyd Garrison, iii: 1841–1849 (Cambridge, MA, 1973), pp. 123–6 at p. 125.

46 Minutes of the BFASS, 27 Feb., 17 and 18 Apr. 1839, fos. 3, 13, 16.

47 Cobden to Sturge, 15 May 1839, where Cobden accused Sturge of ‘adopting a system of monopoly here, by way of putting down a similar evil elsewhere!’, and 26 Feb. 1841, both in Howe, ed., Letters of Richard Cobden, i, pp. 165–6, 216–17. See Sturge's letter on ‘the use of free grown produce in preference to slave-grown, and the promotion of fiscal regulations in favour of the former’, British Emancipator, 23 Jan. 1839.

48 This account is informed by Rice, ‘“Humanity sold for sugar”’; Temperley, British anti-slavery, chs. 7–8 passim; N. Gash, Sir Robert Peel: the life of Sir Robert Peel after 1830 (London, 1972), pp. 252–8, 445–53.

49 Anti-Slavery Reporter, vol. 4, 21 June 1843, p. 104.

50 Ibid., vol. 5, 3 Apr. 1844, p. 53.

51 Ibid., vol. 5, 29 May and 12 June 1844, pp. 96–108, 110–16; League, vol. 1, 1 and 8 June 1844, pp. 574, 589.

52 League, vol. 2, 4 Jan. 1845, pp. 227–8.

53 Ibid., vol. 2, 23 Nov. 1844, 8 Feb. 1845, pp. 130–1, 306. The history of the free labour argument is explored in S. Drescher, The mighty experiment: free labor versus slavery in British emancipation (Oxford, 2002).

54 League, vol. 2, 30 Nov. 1844, p. 146; Drescher, Mighty experiment, p. 158.

55 Rice, ‘“Humanity sold for sugar”’, pp. 417–18; Green, British slave emancipation, pp. 158–9.

56 Cobden to Frederick Cobden, 15 May 1841, in Howe, ed., Letters of Richard Cobden, i, pp. 220–3.

57 John Bright to Sturge, 1 Sept. 1843, Sturge papers, British Library, Add. MS 43845, fos. 12–15.

58 For Sturge's comments, Anti-Slavery Reporter, vol. 5, 3 Apr. 1854, p. 51; for letters of support see 10 and 17 Apr., pp. 55, 59–60, 68; also the additional refutation of the circular on 17 Apr., pp. 61–3.

59 Blair to Scoble, 15 and 23 Apr. 1844, Anti-slavery papers, MSS Brit. Emp. S. 18 C13/139–40.

60 Anti-Slavery Reporter, vol. 5, 1 May 1844, p. 73; minutes of the BFASS, 26 Apr. 1844, Anti-slavery papers, MSS Brit. Emp. S. 20 E2/7, fos. 175–6.

61 J. E. Ritchie, Thoughts on slavery and cheap sugar, a letter to the members and friends of the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society (London, 1844), p. 3. Ritchie was apparently converted by Cobden: Green, British slave emancipation, p. 143.

62 Committee list contained in G. W. Anstie to John Scoble, Anti-Slavery papers, MSS Brit. Emp. S.18, C12/114.

63 League, vol. 1, 21 Sept. 1844, p. 835. Also letters from E. S. Abdy and John Southall: League, 8 and 15 June 1844, pp. 596, 612.

64 Brewin to Scoble, 18 Apr. 1844. The society's delegate to the 1844 convention, Edward Bewlay, voted with Spencer at the meeting. However, see Brewin's relieved letter of 25 May, bringing news of Bewlay's recantation and the committee's newfound unanimity on sugar. Anti-slavery papers, MSS Brit. Emp. S. 18 C14/30–1.

65 Lucas to Scoble, 2 June 1844, Anti-slavery papers, MSS Brit. Emp. S.18 C19/62.

66 Anti-Slavery Reporter, vol. 5, 17 Apr. 1844, p. 68.

67 Ashworth to Cobden, 7 May 1841, Cobden papers, Add. MS 43653, fos. 1–2.

68 As he did in a sugar debate on 24 Feb. 1845: Hansard, 3rd ser. lxxvii, cols. 1127–36, at 1128–9.

69 Cobden to Sturge, 20 June 1844, Sturge papers, Add. MS 50131, fos. 110–11.

70 Fielden, ‘Cobden and America’, p. 156.

71 This also concerned the League's northern friends: Bradford R. Wood to Cobden, 27 Jan. 1845, WSRO, Cobden papers 1, fo. 100.

72 W. S. Belko, The invincible Duff Green: Whig of the west (Columbia, MS, and London, 2006), ch. 21 passim.

73 Proceedings of the Manchester Chamber of Commerce, 13 Sept. 1842, Manchester City Archives, M8/2/4, fos. 224–5; Cobden to Duff Green, 28 Aug., 1, 7, and 13 Sept. 1842, Library of Congress, Duff Green papers, box 2 (7 Sept. reprinted in Howe, ed., Letters of Richard Cobden, i, p. 289).

74 See for example the editorial on the US tariff in the Anti-Bread Tax Circular (hereafter ABTC), 6 Oct. 1842.

75 D. Monroe, The republican vision of John Tyler (College Station, TX, 2003), ch. 5.

76 Cobden to Duff Green, 11 Oct. 1842, Duff Green papers, box 2.

77 D. Green, England and the United States (London, 1842). Interpretations of anti-slavery as based on self-interest are now largely discredited: Temperley, British anti-slavery, pp. 75–6; J. Walvin, ‘Introduction’, in Walvin, ed., Slavery and British society, 1–21, pp. 14–15.

78 Belko, The invincible Duff Green, ch. 22, at p. 367; C. M. Wiltse, John C. Calhoun, sectionalist, 1840–1850 (New York, 1968), p. 73. For example Duff Green to Calhoun, 29 Sept. 1843, in C. N. Wilson, ed., The papers of John C. Calhoun (28 vols., Columbia, SC, 1969–2003), xvi, p. 471.

79 Wiltse, John C. Calhoun, ch. xviii passim; Martin, ‘Free trade and the Oregon question’; Drescher, Mighty experiment, pp. 169–71.

80 Green to Abel Upshur, 17 Oct. 1843, printed in Calhoun papers, xvii, pp. 575–82, at p. 579.

81 ABTC, 30 May, 25 July, 1 Aug. and 5 Sept. 1843.

82 League, vol. 2, 30 Nov. 1844, p. 147.

83 Wilson to Calhoun, 5 Dec. 1844, Calhoun papers, xx, p. 485; Calhoun to Wilson, 24 Mar. 1845, Calhoun papers, xxi, pp. 444–5. Calhoun's reply was printed in the League, vol. 2, 3 May 1845, p. 503; for McDuffie's see vol. 3, 22 Nov. 1845, pp. 99–100.

84 League, vol. 2, 20 Sept., 27 Sept., and 4 Oct. 1845, pp. 821, 834, 853; for a meeting in Charleston, see ‘Free traders the friends of peace’, League, vol. 2, 5 July 1845, p. 642.

85 Clement C. Biddle to Calhoun, 6 July 1846, Calhoun papers, xxiii, pp. 272–3.

86 Cobden to Joseph Parkes, 15 Sept. 1851, Bodleian Library, MS Eng.lett.e.120, fos.138–9.

87 Thompson to Maria Weston Chapman, 2 Oct. 1845, in C. Taylor, ed., British and American abolitionists: an episode in transatlantic understanding (Edinburgh, 1974), pp. 238–9.

88 Thompson to unknown recipient, n.d. [probably 12 Dec. 1844], reprinted in ibid., p. 233.

89 Haughton to Wilson, 27 June 1845, Wilson papers, Manchester City Archives, M20 vol. 8. The League refused to print Haughton's letters on this affair, but see the Liberator, 25 July and 28 Nov. 1845.

90 R. D. Webb to the Westons, n.d., Taylor, ed., British and American abolitionists, pp. 456–9.

91 G. Shepperson, ‘The Free Church and American slavery’, Scottish Historical Review, 30 (1951), pp. 126–43.

92 E. H. Cawley, The American diaries of Richard Cobden (Princeton, 1952), pp. 93–4, 95, 101; on non-intervention: Cobden to Sturge, 16 July 1851 and 18 Apr. 1853: Cobden papers, Add. MS 43656, fos. 211–12, 333–4. Bright defended his own position in similar language: Bright to Sturge, 18 Apr. 1853, Sturge papers, Add. MS 43723, fos. 18–19.

93 For Combe's influence, D. Stack, ‘Phrenological friends: Cobden and his “father confessor” George Combe’, in Howe and Morgan, eds., Rethinking nineteenth-century liberalism, pp. 23–38. These ideas were developed most fully in Combe's Constitution of man (Edinburgh, 1826); see also Hilton, Age of atonement, pp. 189–202.

94 Cobden to Joseph Pease, 26 June 1843, WSRO, Cobden papers 21.

95 Thomas Brewin to Scoble, 25 May 1844, Anti-slavery papers, MSS Brit. Emp. S. 18 C14/31.

96 Martin, ‘Free trade and the Oregon question’; Fielden, ‘Cobden and America’, pp. 165–70.

97 League, ‘Free trade and peace’, vol. 3, 7 Mar. 1846, p. 402; S. C. James and D. A. Lake, ‘The second face of hegemony: Britain's repeal of the Corn Laws and the American Walker Tariff of 1846’, International Organization, 43 (1989), pp. 1–29; D. M. Pletcher, The diplomacy of annexation: Texas, Oregon and the Mexican War (Columbia, MI, 1973), pp. 417–20.

98 S. Meardon, ‘Richard Cobden's American quandary: negotiating peace, free trade and anti-slavery’, in Howe and Morgan, eds., Rethinking nineteenth-century liberalism, pp. 208–26.

99 For the latter, see L. E. N. Marshall, ‘The rhetorics of slavery and citizenship: suffragist discourse and cannonical texts in Britain, 1880–1914’, Gender and History, 13 (2001), pp. 481–97.

100 J. T. Ward, The factory movement, 1830–1855 (London, 1962), p. 34; R. Gray, The factory question and industrial England 1830–1860 (Cambridge, 1996), pp. 37–47.

101 ACLC, ‘Unholy alliance between the slaveholders of America and the British bread-taxers’, 25 Feb. 1841.

102 B. Fladeland, ‘“Our cause being one and the same”: abolitionists and Chartism’, in Walvin, ed., Slavery and British society, pp. 69–99; see ACLC, ‘Black slaves and white slaves’, 25 Mar. 1841.

103 M. Taylor, The decline of British radicalism, 1847–1860 (Oxford, 1995), p. 183.

104 B. Fladeland, Men and brothers: Anglo-American antislavery cooperation (Urbana, IL, 1972), ch. 12 passim.

105 Ceadel, ‘Cobden and peace’; Taylor, Decline of British radicalism, pp. 173–9.

106 E. Biagini, Liberty, retrenchment and reform: popular liberalism in the age of Gladstone (Cambridge, 1992); A. Howe, Free trade and Liberal England, 1846–1946 (Oxford, 1997).