In the early nineteenth century, American abolitionists began to seek inspiration and assistance from overseas in their fight to end slavery. Haiti became a shining example because of its independence from France in 1804, while Britain inspired them by emancipating slaves across its vast empire in 1833. Existing literature demonstrates how anti-slavery Americans learned tactics from these precedents or regarded these areas as possible refuges for Black Americans escaping bondage.Footnote 1 The British empire and Haiti attracted attention mainly because of their histories of enslaving people of African descent. Their emancipation directly influenced the morale and progress of American abolitionism. Nevertheless, this focus leaves largely unexplored the relevance of countries without systematic slavery to American abolitionism. China, for example, provides a valuable window into the significance of a seemingly unrelated nation in the American abolitionist imaginary.
Of course, China faced its own ethnic, though not racial, issues in the nineteenth century. Under pressure from merchants and a growing population, the Qing government gradually relaxed its restrictions on Han migration to peripheral regions such as Xinjiang, Mongolia, and Tibet. Interethnic tensions emerged as a result, despite the Qing’s success in consolidating local obeisance.Footnote 2 Yet contemporaneous Americans learned about China primarily through Euro-American merchants and missionaries, who were restricted from travelling far into the interior of China, let alone its northern and western borderlands. Consequently, China appeared to them not as a country plagued by racial or ethnic conflicts, but as an uncivilized and exotic land. It was despotic, backward, immoral, idolatrous, xenophobic, and heathen, regardless of its praiseworthy crafts, agriculture, and ethics.Footnote 3
American abolitionists naturally knew this Orientalist depiction of China. As a matter of fact, some of them had even participated in the shaping of it. For example, Sydney Howard Gay, who edited the National Anti-Slavery Standard from 1844 to 1854, had travelled to China as a merchant in the 1830s, while Gamaliel Bailey, the editor of the anti-slavery National Era in 1847, was a surgeon on a China trader in 1830.Footnote 4 They and other abolitionists not only endorsed the condescending attitude but used it as a tool to fight slavery. China’s perceived barbarity and backwardness helped anti-slavery activists expose the hypocrisy of both American whites and Britons regarding enslavement, as American abolitionism peaked against the background of British emancipation. Initiated by whites, this prejudiced perception ironically became a weapon against Anglo-American white society. Abolitionists warned white Americans that their support of slavery would degrade them to the level of China, a fact that even their professed benevolence to the Chinese could not conceal. Simultaneously, abolitionists identified in Britain’s approach to China a similar rejection of the principles of humanity and equality that underpinned the anti-slavery movement. In so doing, abolitionists sought to shame Anglo-American whites into ending their practice and support of slavery.
As the abolitionist movement had become explicitly cross-racial by the 1830s, this was actually a strategy shared by white and Black activists. However, there existed significant differences in their concrete approaches. White abolitionists often invoked China to criticize other white people, the British included, in an effort to maintain leadership within the movement. Some of them were more interested in containing rather than abolishing slavery. In contrast, persistent discrimination led African Americans to demand a complete end to human bondage. They often held the entire white American population responsible for the plight of Black people, though they refrained from openly criticizing Britain, which had pioneered the emancipation of slaves. That said, white and Black abolitionists agreed that China was a weak and pitiable Other.
Studying the weaponization of China’s deplorable condition could enhance one’s understanding of American abolitionists’ strategies. For one thing, it complicates the conventional view of their reference to other oppressed people as a source of inspiration and assistance. Most literature merely spotlights the abolitionist attention to regions similarly afflicted by slavery. However, Yue Qiu demonstrates that even nations which did not institutionalize human bondage could attract the attention of anti-slavery Americans due to perceived ‘parallels’ in ‘degradation’. Taking India as an example, Qiu argues that by comparing slavery in ‘supposedly civilized’ America to alleged inequalities in India, abolitionists not only laid bare the inhumanity of slavery but ‘negated the superiority of the West over the East’.Footnote 5 I agree with this basic finding but plan to develop it further. Using China as a rhetorical device, American abolitionists no doubt challenged the Occident’s claim to superiority, but this was an Occident different from what they had expected. If the United States and Great Britain firmly rejected slavery in line with their professed principles, they would meet abolitionist expectations and become the true Occident – more civilized than China and other parts of the Orient. The abolitionist imagination, at least before the end of the Civil War, therefore maintained the Orientalist approach to Asia. This reflected its focus on persuading white society to terminate human bondage rather than challenging whites’ overseas dominance, although, as Qiu reveals, American abolitionism would ultimately acquire an anti-colonial dimension.Footnote 6
Meanwhile, this examination demonstrates that abolitionists’ moral suasion had a richer content than scholars have already acknowledged. According to Richard S. Newman, the ‘new abolitionist activities’ after the 1830s centred upon ‘mass mobilization and emotional outrage’. Abolitionists published ‘gripping accounts of bondage and emotional slave narratives’ to accentuate the immorality of slavery.Footnote 7 Their approach to the British colonies and Haiti as models of manumission just stemmed from recognizing the shared experiences of Black suffering. In contrast, abolitionists’ China-related moral suasion stressed the degradation of white society, which had long boasted of its civilized status. The current investigation thus broadens our perspective on the abolitionist moral campaign, shifting the focus from the personal sufferings of slaves to the ‘unworthy’ decline of white people from their self-proclaimed civility.
To make its point, this article examines the period from 1830 to the conclusion of the Civil War in 1865. The era witnessed both the rise of moral suasion as a crucial tactic and the extensive involvement of Black activists in the anti-slavery movement. Reflecting the racial composition of abolitionism, my analysis draws on the press articles, correspondence, and pamphlets produced by both white and Black activists. While China was mentioned frequently, I focus only on those sources that incorporate the trope of China into abolitionist efforts to end slavery. My examination foregrounds the points of consensus between white and Black authors while acknowledging the nuances along racial lines. It also highlights the consistent themes that run through disparate periods while remaining attentive to their varied expressions at different moments. Consequently, the article is organized thematically rather than by race or chronology.
I
For one thing, not immune to the degrading characterization of China in nineteenth-century American society, abolitionists regarded this depiction as a reliable benchmark for assessing the degree to which American advocates of slavery had failed to uphold their professed ideals of civilization. Accepting China’s alleged barbarities as fact, abolitionists warned white Americans that, by persistently enslaving Black people, they had actually descended to China’s level in the world hierarchy. As this judgement threatened to undermine the civilized image that white Americans sought to project – and that abolitionists themselves believed America should embody – anti-slavery activists expected the comparison to serve as a stern warning that slavery must come to an end. White abolitionists were careful to concentrate their criticisms on white supporters of slavery, but their Black colleagues typically did not make that differentiation, though they were quick to demonstrate their patriotism.
While the era under discussion began with the adoption of mass mobilization as a crucial strategy, anti-slavery activists were deeply concerned about the caution many people displayed regarding abolition. One means by which they attempted to change that was playing up China’s perceived inhumanities to underscore the horrible implications of silence on slavery. Some people argued that Northerners should avoid discussing slavery because of their limited knowledge of the issue. The Liberator, a major anti-slavery newspaper run by white people, dismissed the assumption as ‘ludicrous’. It drew a parallel to the absurd notion that people should refrain from condemning ‘infanticide as practiced in China’ simply because they were unfamiliar with the custom. They should regard ‘many of the practices and laws of the Southern States’ as ‘proper objects of reprehension’ even though they did not know ‘the general state of society there’, the paper contended.Footnote 8 In 1834, witnessing no obvious improvement in public sentiment, The Liberator urged abolitionists to awaken those self-styled guardians of liberty through a ‘revolution’ in public opinion, much like how Chinese mandarins would be shocked by the assertion that ‘murdering new-born children is miserably wrong’. Such a change would enable people to openly and freely ‘question and examine’ the ‘“evil” sanctioned by law’ while transforming public sentiment ‘from debate to battle, from the tongue to the sword, and from the pen to the spear’, believed The Liberator.Footnote 9
In the following years, abolitionists raised China as a red flag that the United States must navigate around when dealing with slavery, if it wished to remain civilized. Qiu mentions that since the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM) refused to judge membership applicants in line with their position on slavery, Christian abolitionists organized their own anti-slavery missionary societies.Footnote 10 While taking these actions, anti-slavery Christians also sent memorials to the ABCFM to advocate abolition. One petition in 1845 invoked China’s alleged degradation to highlight America’s fall from its ideal state. As slavery existed ‘in some of its modifications’, in China and other parts of Americans’ ‘great missionary field’, it was ‘one of the consequences of human depravity’, the document believed. It exhorted the church to eliminate this ‘unnatural state of society’ and all the related ‘social wrongs and disorders’ to demonstrate its ‘regard for justice and human rights’.Footnote 11 Rather than implicitly censuring white supporters of slavery, Frederick Douglass, the most renowned African American activist of the nineteenth century, forthrightly denounced American slavery as ‘in contrast with nature’ and likened it to ‘the iron shoe, and crippled foot of China’. Addressing the Ladies Anti-Slavery Society in Rochester, New York, in 1852, he called on white Americans to abolish slavery immediately. Still, to highlight his patriotism amid adversity, Douglass assured his audience that he did ‘not despair of this country’. With the Declaration of Independence and ‘the great principles it contains’, he said, the United States could become perfect by embracing ‘the all-pervading light’ of openness and by ending the ‘abuse’ of Black people.Footnote 12
Specifically, abolitionists believed that America’s political system had been corrupted by slavery to such an extent that it resembled Chinese despotism. Writing to Frederick Douglass on 12 December 1856, James McCune Smith, the first African American to earn a medical degree, forthrightly likened ‘our free institutions’ to China’s oppressive system. The Chinese ‘despot is a concrete man, ours an abstract thing, called a compromise’, by which Smith obviously meant the North’s concession on slavery. While ‘the Matchou [Manchu] Tartars’ ruled China, he continued, ‘a few Southern slaveholders’ commanded ‘our armies our fleets, and our money chests’. Just as ‘High Mandarins’ kowtowed before the Chinese emperor, American politicians knelt ‘before the Immaculate Goddess of Slavery in the slave States’.Footnote 13 In The Anglo-African Magazine, Smith once again compared American slavery to Chinese institutions. He even criticized America’s founding father Thomas Jefferson and other white Americans for acting like the Chinese ‘educational and political system’, which ignored the ‘remarkable diversity of character and culture’. They therefore refused to let Black men live with whites in harmony. Contrary to ‘the nature of the people’, this scheme to exclude African Americans as ‘one of the positive elements of natural progress’ risked turning the United States into ‘another China’, Smith warned.Footnote 14
Also comparing American slavery to Chinese despotism was white abolitionist Wendell Phillips. Yet unlike African Americans who focused on Black victims, he expected America’s reformed institutions to benefit not only Black people but also white Americans. Speaking to the American Anti-Slavery Society in 1864, he contended that the United States should allow ‘no such despotism this side the wall of China’. Only in this way could ‘twenty million of white men and four million of black’ live together peacefully. ‘The o’er-ladened frigate’ of ‘Republican government’ could then reach ‘her harbor’ to secure ‘the liberty of the whole’ at the end of ‘this death-grapple with rebellion’, Phillips concluded.Footnote 15
Refusal to practise true Christianity was another similarity that abolitionists detected between China and pro-slavery America. White Americans had long used the ‘heathen barometer’ to demarcate the bounds of ‘a genteel Anglo-Protestant norm’, according to Kathryn Gin Lum. While labelling external non-white people as heathens to emphasize their supposed inferiority and lack of civilization, white Americans depicted African Americans as ‘virtual heathens in need of paternalistic oversight’. Black Americans countered by portraying ‘misbehaving and misbelieving’ white people themselves as heathens, who had forfeited their ‘Americanness, Christianity, and claims to “civilization”’ by supporting slavery.Footnote 16 Since 1830, China had been one important field for Americans seeking to spread Christianity and assert their self-proclaimed superiority. Abolitionists not only adopted the white Christian logic that described the Chinese as heathens but also referenced this supposed heathenism to illustrate how far America had fallen from its original civilized and superior status.
As a white-run weekly, The Liberator seemed reluctant to blame the entire white Christian community for overlooking the plight of Black slaves and descending into heathenism. Instead, it zeroed in on specific religious institutions. For instance, on 31 May 1834, The Liberator invoked the alleged heathenism of China to claim that the American Bible Society was ‘forbid[ding] the light of Christianity to one-sixth part of our population’ and turning the United States into ‘an anti-Christian country, as really as China’. The paper made the accusation because the Bible Society attempted to ‘throw out the proposition’ by the American Anti-Slavery Society that ‘pledged FIVE THOUSAND DOLLARS’ to help ‘put the slaves in possession of God’s word’.Footnote 17
In 1850, the Taiping Rebellion erupted in China. Since its leader, Hong Xiuquan, had been influenced by Christianity, this revolt against the Qing dynasty gave Americans hope that China was finally abandoning its heathenism. Abolitionists were among those excited by the prospect. For example, Sydney Howard Gay sympathized with the Taipings even though he condemned the ‘depredations of Western merchants and missionaries’, while Mary Ann Shadd Cary, a Black American woman publisher living in Canada at the time, celebrated ‘even the spurious Christianity’ of the Taiping rebels for setting China on the path to ‘renounce domestic slavery’.Footnote 18 However, this optimism did not last long. As early as 1854, The National Era warned that the Taipings were originally ‘bands of robbers in Canton and Kwang-si Provinces’. Their leader’s ‘knowledge of the Bible’ did not promise much to be ‘hoped for mankind’. After all, the rebel forces seemed to ‘use Bible truth as a foundation for their own pretended revelations from Heaven’.Footnote 19 At the end of the year, The Era once again accused the rebels of making ‘the most blasphemous claims of intimate and personal communication with the Deity’ and displaying ‘great ignorance’ of the ‘true meaning’ of the Scriptures, ‘or a willful perversion of it to vile purposes’. Their ‘idolatry and its attendant vices’ would disappoint even ‘the most sanguine hopes of Christians and Philanthropists’.Footnote 20 By the end of the decade, The Era had reason enough to announce that the Taiping Rebellion had ‘little or nothing that is good, unless by indirection’. It was ‘only evil, and that continually’.Footnote 21
Against this background, the Christian-inspired Taiping revolt did almost nothing to alter American abolitionists’ perception of China as heathen. They continued to compare white Christians to pagan Chinese, urging Americans to remember that they should be more civilized. Black publisher A. P. Smith did just this when writing to Frederick Douglass on 25 August 1858. He condemned the American church as a major accomplice to slavery. Just as China required everyone, even a Christian, to ‘become a regular visitor to the temple of Confucius’ and ‘conform to all the rites there observed’, Smith wrote, the American church exhibited a ‘general compliance with the demands of slavery’. He criticized it for forcing ‘colored men and friends of the slave’ to endure ‘degrading conditions’ and to ‘sacrifice our humanity upon the altars of a pro-slavery Church’. This revealed the church’s ‘disregard of human rights’ and its lack of sympathy for ‘sorrowful and suffering’ slaves, Smith stated.Footnote 22
Obstinate self-centrism linked pro-slavery America to China as well, according to abolitionists. In 1846, the Wilmot Proviso proposed banning slavery in the territory newly acquired from Mexico, igniting fierce opposition from the South. A South Carolinian convention even threatened to take ‘extreme measures’ if Congress passed the bill. Condemning South Carolina for its self-centrism, the National Anti-Slavery Standard called the state ‘a sort of American China’. Every white resident there considered himself the ‘brother of the Sun’ and ‘cousin germane of the Moon’, while denigrating all others as ‘a congregation of outside barbarians’. Rather than calling for a complete end to slavery, the newspaper merely urged South Carolina to accept the geographical limits set on the institution; after all, they could not force the object of ‘carrying their slaves into California’. As if only South Carolinian whites coveted the expansion of slavery, the Standard warned that ‘the other States of the Union’ would form ‘a wall of fire around them’ and plunge them into ‘utter insignificance’.Footnote 23
After the Civil War broke out, the National Anti-Slavery Standard once again identified the Chinese-style vanity of the South as one root cause of American slavery. As it editorialized on 15 March 1862, white Southerners, just ‘like the Chinese’, had ‘come to regard all other people as barbarians’. They rejected the ‘free and beneficent institutions’ of the North and remained ‘cursed with slavery and rule by a Slave Oligarchy’, becoming ‘almost as impossible of access as China’. The Standard portrayed the entire North as anti-slavery by equating ‘Yankee’ to ‘abolitionist’. Given the South’s self-imposed seclusion and obstinacy, the paper could only wish that the Northern armies could introduce into that region ‘the various civilizing influences which have given such superiority of intelligence and wealth to the social system of the North’.Footnote 24
Other abolitionists not only made similar observations but cited the perceived dire consequences of China’s ‘uncivilized’ conduct to bolster their arguments. Despite the absence of race-based slavery in China, abolitionists framed its rigid social hierarchy as a parallel and attributed its purportedly delayed development at least partially to this flaw. In 1859, James McCune Smith declared that China’s social hierarchy and America’s slavery were both forms of caste. China’s perceived backwardness thus demonstrated that slavery could render American civilization ‘arrested’ and ‘stationary’, sinking it ‘back into barbarism’. He urged Americans to ‘remove the last barrier’ of ‘caste and slavery’ to enhance ‘our national advancement’. As a Black abolitionist, Smith believed that ‘the negro variety of mankind’ had a special ‘duty’ to expedite that process by fighting their way into ‘the pale of civilization, with the chances of becoming part and parcel thereof’.Footnote 25
By maintaining a racial caste, slavery effectively prevented Black people from being accepted into the American nation, allowing America to remain predominantly white. Abolitionists cited the negative consequences of China’s single-race composition to caution Americans against the continued enslavement of African Americans. In a letter to Frederick Douglass dated 19 July 1852, Black intellectual William G. Allen argued that ‘no truly great nation composed of a SINGLE race had ever yet written its name in any page of human history’, nor could it ever do so if there was ‘any virtue in science, philosophy and religion’. He challenged sceptics to answer if ‘China, or any other single-raced nation’ had displayed ‘greatness (greatness worthy of the name, I mean)’. As ‘it takes many parts to make a whole’, the United States should become a country that promoted racial equality rather than remaining ‘anti-Christian’, ‘pro-slavery’, and ‘prejudiced’.Footnote 26 The National Era echoed this analysis by focusing on the detrimental impact of a single-race makeup on white people themselves. In the 1850s, the South was eager to extend its ‘peculiar institution’ into the West and place the region under the monopoly of ‘slave labor’. Because ‘slave labor’ was incompatible with ‘free white labor’, this scheme, if successful, would close the gates of the West ‘upon the white man’, ironically resulting in a single-race West. Obviously interested in containing slavery within the South to minimize its influence on the white population, The Era asked pro-slavery Americans to think of ‘the condition of the laborer’ in densely populated China before imagining the impact of this scenario on the ‘millions’ of whites ‘thrown back on the Northern States’.Footnote 27
To more effectively embarrass American advocates of slavery and compel them to restore America to its supposedly rightful glory, abolitionists even suggested that the despised Chinese were actually more enlightened. For her graphic description of Black miseries under slavery in Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) and other works, Harriet Beecher Stowe came under fierce attack from pro-slavery Americans. They condemned her narrative as ‘inaccurate to the point of being inflammatory’ and Stowe herself as ‘having violated all protocols for womanly behavior’.Footnote 28 Such vilification aroused angry rebuttals from the abolitionist community. In 1853, Joseph C. Holly, a Black crusader against slavery, invoked China’s supposed zealous response to Stowe to tell supporters of slavery that they had become more barbarous. As he put it in a poem, Stowe not only saw her Black ‘brother, bruised, and bow’d’ and heard him ‘groan, and cry aloud’, she also sang ‘the burthen of his song’. The British, who had emancipated slaves in their colonies, heard her song ‘on the strand’. Even in China, a country considered barbaric, ‘Myriads thy magic power own’, Holly assured Stowe.Footnote 29 However, Stowe was not well known in China in the middle of the nineteenth century. Missionary schools might have recommended Uncle Tom’s Cabin to Chinese students, but it was only after Lin Shu and his collaborator translated it into Chinese in 1901 that the novel gained popularity among Chinese intellectuals.Footnote 30 Holly’s statement was an exaggeration, but he exaggerated to warn white America against becoming even less civilized than China.
White abolitionists were more careful to direct their criticisms specifically at pro-slavery white Americans. On 26 June 1854, the Daily National Era, a newspaper that the publishers of The National Era issued in 1854, concentrated on the Richmond Examiner, ‘probably the most reckless and fanatical Pro-Slavery journal in the South’. The Examiner attempted to legitimate slavery by claiming that ‘the experience of free society’ had been ‘small’, ‘short’, and ‘disastrous’ in human history. Refuting this ‘whole statement and every part of it’ as fully groundless, the Daily National Era argued that ‘the experiment of free society’ had even been going on ‘from time immemorial in China’.Footnote 31 In an 1855 open letter, abolitionist O. S. Freeman referenced China as well to warn American proponents of slavery about their civilizational decline. ‘A thousand travelers in the orient’ had told the ‘melancholy tale of the ruins of ancient nations, destroyed by despotism’, sending a warning to America of ‘the deadly effects of slavery’, he wrote. But the ‘pro-slavery school’ was ‘so corrupt, so base’, as to plunge America into that ‘terrible’ state ‘so often and so fatally repeated in the old world!’ Slavery destroyed civilization, bringing forth ‘anarchy, corruption, civil war and barbarism’, contended Freeman. To reinforce his assertion, he announced that slavery even violated ‘the fundamental law’ of the Chinese empire.Footnote 32 When writing to Frederick Douglass on 18 January 1853, Albro S. Brown, a New York wagon maker, insisted that slavery did not exist in ‘superstitious and degraded’ China, but persisted in ‘civilized and Christian America’. It remained entrenched even ‘at the noon of the nineteenth century’ and ‘in a land containing thirty-six thousand churches’, Brown angrily protested.Footnote 33
Specifically, abolitionists viewed daily social life as an area where slaveholding America lagged even behind China in terms of civilization. Mob violence was one important means by which white Americans maintained their privileged position. Against this backdrop, The Liberator exclaimed in 1837 that African Americans could ‘enjoy more personal safety in China’ than in the South or in those parts of the North that were ‘under southern influence’. Once again suggestive of a sectional perspective rather than a racial one, the paper focused on the Southern determination to ‘hug’ slavery ‘in perpetuity’. Of course, it was a regret that ‘the Union’ failed to provide adequate protection to ‘our citizens’ hunted and persecuted by ‘southern bullies, or their northern sycophants’, asserted The Liberator.Footnote 34 On 12 May 1855, the National Anti-Slavery Standard described Americans as more barbarian by comparing ‘child-selling’ in China and in the US South. Even though American missionaries attributed the Chinese practice to ‘the influence of “HEATHENISM”’, the paper ridiculed, Southern slaveholders sold the children they fathered with enslaved women despite their ostensible belief in ‘the same religion’ that missionaries propagated in China. It was more excusable for fathers in ‘poor heathen China’ to sell children under ‘extreme poverty’, hinted the Standard.Footnote 35
Because of such contrasts, William P. Powell explicitly treated China as more civilized than the United States. Powell was a prominent African American abolitionist who moved to Liverpool, England, in 1851, to escape racial discrimination. In a letter that the National Anti-Slavery Standard published on 8 May 1851, he claimed that even ‘Pagan China’, not to mention ‘the whole civilized world’, was more humane than the United States. He believed that China had offered African Americans ‘sympathy and protection’ and extended ‘the right hand of human brotherhood’ to ‘panting’ fugitive slaves, though he did not provide any details. In stark contrast, both American ‘Church and State, priest and people’ consistently endorsed and extended slavery. The United States had become a ‘guilty slaveholding, pseudo-Christian nation’ that attempted to conceal its inhumanities ‘from the gaze of the whole world’, Powell concluded.Footnote 36
Notwithstanding the different emphases of white and Black abolitionists, they agreed that pro-slavery Americans were at least as uncivilized as the Chinese. In articulating this consensus, they no doubt reinforced the stereotypical perception of China in the nineteenth-century United States. Yet their ultimate objective was to urge white Americans to uphold their professed ideals of civility. By placing them in a comparative framework with the Chinese, abolitionists sought to tell advocates of slavery that the enforcement of human bondage had reduced them to a level of existence that they themselves must find detestable. While revealing a belief that America should be more civilized than both its current state and China, they expected this tactic to effectively embarrass white society and convince them into reconsidering their attitude toward the Black population.
II
Regardless of their persistently barbarous treatment of Black slaves, white Americans sought to project a civilized image to the outside world. This contradiction prompted abolitionists to invoke China to expose white people’s hypocrisies as well. Accepting the prevailing white stereotype of China as backward and heathen, they accused white Americans of deviating from this perception by paying more attention to the Chinese or even treating them more benevolently than African Americans. China functioned to prove that since white Americans deemed Black people similarly uncivilized and pitiable, they should at least extend equal generosity to them. Their failure to do so both exposed the emptiness of their professed principles and underscored the necessity of making African Americans one integral part of a civilized American nation. In conveying this message, anti-slavery Black people were less inclined to emphasize that only some segments of the white population supported enslavement. They were more interested in demonstrating and proving the sufferings and potentials of their own race.
As Lum rightly argues, white Americans cast non-white people as heathens to assert their self-proclaimed superiority. They assumed the responsibility of uplifting these so-called heathens while emphasizing ‘the sweeping similarities between the poor heathen of the world’.Footnote 37 Conceding the superiority of Christianity to heathenism, abolitionists did not challenge Christians’ work in China but condemned their supposed indifference to African Americans’ need for Christian care and acceptance. Congregational minister Horace Bushnell effectively encapsulated this mentality in an 1839 address. Speaking on slavery at the North Church of Hartford, Connecticut, he praised ‘our holy religion’ as ‘a spirit of universal humanity and benevolence’. It transcended ‘all barriers’ and enabled people to ‘feel the pulse of joy and woe in every human being’. As Christianity had brought China to ‘our doors, and us to theirs’, believed Bushnell, there was no reason for it to ‘make us aliens’ to ‘our’ African American ‘countrymen’, ‘or permit us to be’.Footnote 38 Echoing this observation was Samuel Hanson Cox, a Presbyterian minister and abolitionist. In a letter published by the National Anti-Slavery Standard on 16 April 1859, he criticized American missionaries for making China ‘open to us’ but keeping the South ‘in moral blockade against the mercies of the missionary angel’. By ‘moral blockade’, Cox apparently referred to Christians’ indifference to Black slaves, since he reminded people that America was ‘one and indivisible, now and forever’, and that ‘the God of Heaven preserve and perpetuate its strength benign!’Footnote 39
Following this line of thought, abolitionists censured Christians’ acquiescence to slavery as a betrayal of the true Christian spirit. Even their silence was intolerable, given their fervour in preaching the Gospel in China and other so-called heathen countries. For example, in an 1857 pamphlet, Presbyterian minister and writer Albert Barnes criticized ‘a most melancholy calm’ on slavery in American churches. This ‘conservatism’ contrasted with Christians’ ‘peculiar zeal to carry the gospel to China’, even though slavery was an institution ‘not less baneful in its influence than any which exists in heathen lands’ and ‘the condition of the African slave in the United States’ was no better than that of ‘the inhabitants of China’. Since the indifference to slavery ‘violates the fundamental principles’ of Christians’ ‘own nature’, Barnes proclaimed, they should not keep African Americans in bondage while trying to free the Chinese from ‘idolatry’.Footnote 40 The Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society echoed in 1860 that ‘a large portion of the American Church and clergy’ displayed ‘a continued apathy’ toward the ‘claims of the slave’. Standing ‘on the side of the oppressor’, they even persecuted dissidents who ‘faithfully apply the doctrine of Christianity’ to slavery. These ‘professed Christian ministers and laymen’ attempted to ‘abolish cruelty and injustice and vice’ in China while refusing to ‘withdraw their support from cruelty, injustice and vice at home’, the society angrily pointed out.Footnote 41
By turning a blind eye to the plight of Black slaves, white Americans violated the very logic that they had established for dealing with all heathens, abolitionists believed. According to white abolitionist John McCluskey, the ‘first step’ that Christians should take when dealing with ‘darkness in Pagan and foreign lands’ was to ‘fully explore the state of things and know the evils’ that the church would meet and destroy. They did this in China but refused to do the same in the American South, immersing ‘that, already too dark side of our nation, in deeper darkness still’. If white Christians believed that they had no right to ‘interfere with the regulations of the South’, McCluskey argued, then they ‘must not interfere’ with those of China either.Footnote 42 Because of this inconsistency, the National Anti-Slavery Standard directly called white Christians ‘liar[s]’ and ‘hypocrite[s]’ on 19 June 1851. They loved ‘the heathen abroad…in China’ while hating or neglecting ‘the heathen at home’, by which the paper referred to Black slaves who were excluded from the church. The Standard called on the Christian to ‘love his brother whom he hath seen’ if he ‘loves God’.Footnote 43
American Christians’ hypocrisy even aroused the attention of foreign abolitionists, which was timely reported by US anti-slavery publications to reinforce their condemnation of American supporters of slavery. On 4 April 1851, The Liberator published a speech by British abolitionist George Thompson delivered in New York. Thompson criticized American Christians for saving their ‘brother[s]’ in China but neglecting their ‘brother[s] here’. He prodded them to adopt ‘God’s method to save man by man’.Footnote 44 In the National Anti-Slavery Standard of 23 December 1854, Scottish Remonstrants denounced American Christians’ inconsistency in trying to ‘illuminate’ China in the spirit of ‘love’ while ‘doom[ing] to heathen darkness millions in your own country’. For the United States to be ‘a Christian land’ in line with ‘the very spirit of Christianity’, they urged American Christians to be ‘consistent’ and extend ‘the brotherhood of humanity’ to their ‘fellow-men’.Footnote 45
The coolie trade was another mirror that abolitionists used to reflect the hypocrisy of pro-slavery Americans. After Britain and Spain emancipated slaves in their American colonies in the early nineteenth century, Caribbean and South American sugar planters began to import indentured workers from China, or Chinese coolies, as substitutes. However, because Chinese labour was deemed cheaper than slaves, pro-slavery Americans regarded coolies as a threat to slavery. They therefore openly opposed the coolie trade under the pretext of stopping the inhumane treatment of Chinese labourers. The US government joined the opposition, convinced that suppressing the trade could provide an excuse for expanding American influence into the Asia-Pacific region. In contrast, many abolitionists supported the coolie trade as an opportunity to ‘peacefully, gradually, and profitably’ end slavery in the United States.Footnote 46
Against this background, abolitionists attacked white Americans’ attention to Chinese coolies as evidence of their hypocrisy regarding slavery and of their fall from a rightful position of civilization. On 10 May 1856, the National Anti-Slavery Standard once again targeted American Christians, challenging them to explain whether they would continue to lament the ‘suicides’ of ‘poor’ Chinese coolies while showing ‘no sympathy’ for ‘a Southern mother’s murder of her child, to save it from slavery’. They considered the ‘confined sea voyage’ of Chinese coolies as ‘really so appalling’ but remained emotionless at ‘the countless miseries of the human droves in our own country’, the Standard continued. It saw a glaring inconsistency between white Christians’ condemnation of ‘the systematic cruelties’ inflicted on the Chinese and their indifference to ‘the greater cruelties practiced nearer home’.Footnote 47 The Liberator agreed on 23 May 1856 that pro-slavery Americans were ‘the most shameless hypocrites and calumniators’. Even though the ‘servitude’ that Chinese coolies endured was identical to ‘the slavery suffered by the African race’, the paper averred, slavery advocates showed ‘great pain and horror at the enslavement of a Chinese’ while supporting Black slavery ‘with the greatest gusto’. Through this contrast, The Liberator sought to expose pro-slavery Americans’ ‘audacity and cold-blooded hypocrisy’.Footnote 48
Of course, Americans’ concern for Chinese coolies was not genuine but rather a calculated step to sustain slavery, as The Liberator keenly noted on 18 April 1856. The New York Express condemned ‘Northern freighting ships’ for conducting ‘an immense business’ in transporting ‘Chinese slaves’ to Cuba and South America ‘horribly’. However, it was actually ‘men of the New York Express’s own stamp’ that were involved in the coolie trade, countered The Liberator. The claim of the Express was an effort to ‘shoulder the blame of this infamous business upon the Anti-Slavery men of the North’ so that ‘the projects of the slavery extensionists’ could proceed unopposed. Abolitionists viewed such ‘characteristic meanness’ with ‘abhorrence’, The Liberator declared.Footnote 49
Abolitionists attempted to highlight the hypocrisy of pro-slavery Americans even by exaggerating the status of China in the eyes of white Americans. Some claimed that white people were civilizing the Chinese at the expense of Black Americans. In 1837, the Anti-Slavery Convention of American Women accused Northern women of pouring ‘treasures into the funds of the Foreign Missionary Society’ to evangelize China but remaining indifferent to ‘the perishing souls of our own countrymen’. By diverting what their ‘hands and lips and pens and purses can do’ to ‘nations afar off’, these women failed to ‘induce the South to abolish a system’ that excluded ‘one half of her population’ from Christianity. The convention challenged them to answer if they had ‘nothing to do this “NATION OF HEATHENS IN OUR VERY MIDST”’.Footnote 50 Black abolitionist W. M. Mitchell supported the accusation with his personal observation in the South. After moving to Canada, where slavery was no longer legal, he published The underground railroad from slavery to freedom (1860), the only full-length account of the network to freedom by a participant when slavery was still allowed in the United States. In this book, which was extremely popular among American abolitionists, Mitchell condemned the United States not only for failing to uphold the principles of ‘the immortal Declaration of Independence’ for African Americans but also for using slaves as assets to fund evangelizing efforts worldwide. For instance, he remembered seeing in South Carolina a Black girl ‘sold to contribute to a mission in China’. ‘Is this what the Americans mean by all men being created free? Where is their equality?’, he asked angrily.Footnote 51
In the abolitionist telling, not only did China witness the stark contrast between white Americans’ treatment of Blacks and the Chinese, it also helped expose their lack of the virtues that they claimed to possess. White Americans always flaunted their commitment to Christianity, but upon closer examination, abolitionists found them sorely lacking in its true spirit. For example, from slaveholders’ inconsistency in sending missionaries to China and excusing ‘the heathenism of America’ as manifested in slavery, Unitarian minister Theodore Parker believed that they needed ‘the whole counsel of God’ more than anybody else. True Christianity could inspire them to ‘oppose slavery with the same zeal’ that they directed against perceived ‘heresy, infidelity, unbelief’ in foreign lands, he opined.Footnote 52 Seeking to compel slaveholders to treat slaves humanely rather than abolish slavery outright, James Freeman Clarke, another Unitarian minister, expressed a similar understanding by citing the pope’s handling of the rite controversy in China. In the early eighteenth century, the pope decisively halted the Jesuit mission in China because he believed that the Chinese could not practise true Christianity while maintaining ancestor worship. But the American Tract Society of New York omitted ‘an essential part of Christianity’, namely ‘the duties of masters’ to slaves, while ‘carry[ing] a Christianity to the South’, Clarke announced at a New England Anti-Slavery Convention in May 1858. The society was therefore ‘not as true as the Pope and the Papal Chamber’.Footnote 53
At least twice did the Frederick Douglass’ Paper publish Canadian abolitionist views making similar arguments. On 10 April 1851, a letter from an unnamed Canadian criticized Americans for the hypocrisy of simultaneously ‘go[ing] as missionaries to China’ to teach the Chinese to be ‘righteous’ while keeping ‘three millions’ of their fellow men ‘chained, scourged and benighted’. The United States was ‘in far greater need of the gospel of liberty’ than any other nation because it was ‘more really adverse to the spirit of that gospel’, the abolitionist argued.Footnote 54 In the Frederick Douglass’ Paper of 19 May 1854, Michael Willis, the president of the Canada Anti-Slavery Society, asserted that white Americans had ‘perverted’ the Scripture to ‘support the Slavery system’. As a remedy, they should ‘agitate the question of Anti Slavery’ with the same enthusiasm that they displayed in dispatching missions to China, Willis insisted. After all, the Bible was ‘altogether in favor of abolition’.Footnote 55
Closely related to their religious hypocrisy, white Americans were strict in judging other nations, such as China, on moral grounds while remaining blind to their own moral failings, abolitionists observed. On 16 June 1855, the National Anti-Slavery Standard criticized American Christians for supporting slavery but exhorting people to ‘preach the Gospel’ around the world. Due to this inconsistency, they would ‘make a parade’ of impieties if ‘they occur…in China’ but would ‘pass them over in silence’ if they were ‘perpetrated in our own beloved Christian land’. The Standard ridiculed such reactions as ‘very meet and consistent’.Footnote 56 In 1857, a minister of the Methodist Episcopal Church in Maryland was found guilty simply for possessing one copy of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. The National Anti-Slavery Standard believed it ludicrous for his persecutors to tout Americans as ‘the most enlightened and liberal and humane and happy people on the globe’ while looking down upon ‘half-civilized’ China with ‘sovereign contempt’.Footnote 57
To Frederick Douglass, even certain white abolitionists were occasionally inconsistent. As a prominent abolitionist weekly, The National Era was an important ally for anti-slavery Black activists. In 1859, Oregon adopted a constitution that banned ‘free negroes or mulattoes’ from residing or holding properties in the state. Rather than condemning this stipulation, The National Era sought to exonerate ‘the Republicans who voted’ for it by downplaying its actual impact. However, Douglass rejected this stance. Besides criticizing it for harming Black interests and doing ‘little credit to the candor of The National Era’, he lamented that ‘the accomplished editor of the Era’ lacked consistency. While welcoming ‘the opening of the heart of China’ to American encroachment, Douglass pointed out, the editor expressed ‘joy’ over the exclusion of African Americans from the ‘Christian State’ of Oregon. He petitioned God to ‘save the black man from such friends!’Footnote 58
America’s hypocrisy was also evident in denying foreigners the right to intervene in American slavery while asserting its own to meddle in the affairs of other nations. In its 1842 report, the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society considered it ‘a fact worthy of notice’ that ‘foreign interference with the subject of slavery received the preacher’s censure’ while ‘foreign missions’ were promoted in American churches. ‘The professedly Christian church of America’ sent missionaries to ‘idolatrous Asia’, scaling ‘the wall of China’. However, when foreign churches reciprocated this ‘benevolence’ by dispatching men to urge America to ‘purify herself’ from slavery which was ‘disgracing her in the eyes of Christendom, and exposing her to the judgment of God’, ‘how has she received them?’Footnote 59 By raising this rhetorical question, the society exposed white Christians’ emphasis on the right of unilateral interference and their consequent hypocrisy regarding sovereignty. Justice Benjamin Curtis of the Supreme Court made a similar point in his dissent to the notorious Dred Scott decision of 1857, which held that residing in a free state did not entitle a slave to freedom. The rationale behind the ruling was that the federal government lacked authority to enforce the congressional ban on slavery in the South. Yet Curtis found no justification for the Court’s inaction, noting that the ‘great system of municipal laws’ passed by Congress had been extended ‘over the vessels and crews of the United States resident in China’, with the ‘power to inflict even capital punishment within that country’.Footnote 60
Besides seeking to embarrass white Americans by exposing their deviation from the true American spirit, abolitionists also warned that such defects could jeopardize America’s national interests. Black Americans’ progress was first and foremost a victim of white people’s refusal to abolish slavery. African American abolitionists strongly believed that people of African descent possessed greater potential than so-called backward peoples such as the Chinese. In an 1857 lecture, James Theodore Holly, the first African American ordained as a bishop in the Protestant Episcopal Church, referenced the allegedly undesirable role of the Chinese in West Indies’s development to highlight Black people’s talents. While Britain’s ‘miserable shuffling in establishing Coolie and Chinese apprenticeship’ failed to achieve much in those islands, he contended, Haiti achieved a ‘high degree of prosperity’ after independence liberated ‘the negro genius’ from ‘the capricious despotism of individual masters’.Footnote 61 This confidence in Black capabilities found a receptive audience in Owen Lovejoy, a congressman who challenged white justifications for maintaining slavery. Speaking in the House of Representatives on 5 April 1860, he condemned ‘extreme men’ for claiming that slavery was ‘a mode of imparting Christianity and civilization to slaves’. As a matter of fact, he argued, slaves’ potential was so suppressed that slavery displayed ‘a powerful tendency to drag communities back to barbarism’. To show the severity of the situation, Lovejoy asked his colleagues to consult the Smithsonian Institution or the Patent Office. They would find that the implements on Southern plantations exhibited ‘just about the same development in civilization’ as ‘implements of husbandry’ imported from China. Slavery had dragged Black people far ‘below the plane of the Christian civilization of the age’, Lovejoy lamented.Footnote 62
On the other hand, white Americans’ failure to abolish slavery damaged America’s international image as well. In 1834, abolitionist A. A. Phelps bluntly declared that, just because of some people’s ‘utter and shameful inconsistency and guilt’ regarding slavery, Americans could not ‘go to China and try to scale her wall’. After all, the United States had erected ‘a higher and broader wall of prejudice and hatred here’. As ‘the CURSE OF SLAVERY is upon all we do and say’, Phelps emphasized, ‘OUR HANDS ARE TIED’.Footnote 63 On the eve of the Civil War, a Northern Methodist periodical once again warned Americans, especially Christians, that their support of slavery was ‘not done in a corner’ and ‘cannot be suppressed’. ‘It is known in England and China’, it asserted. As a result, ‘slavery at home’ could be ‘a hindrance to the missionary cause’ not only in the United States but in ‘all foreign lands’. The publication asked all American Christians to take the prospect seriously, since ‘the heathen will not see a distinction’ between Northern and Southern churches.Footnote 64
Of course, no abolitionist was so naive as to be unaware of pro-slavery Americans’ hypocrisy. However, by referencing China, they highlighted that hypocrisy more starkly and convincingly besides demonstrating their own loyalty to an idealized America. This use of China was not meant to convey abolitionists’ envy of the greater attention or better treatment that China supposedly received. Rather, it was intended to express their commitment to safeguarding the ideals of civilization shared by white and Black Americans. Anti-slavery activists hoped that, in this way, white people could be persuaded to cease supporting slavery. Of course, there should be no denial that such a manoeuvre sustained, rather than alleviated, Americans’ Orientalist condescension toward China.
III
While Americans were still fighting for the abolition of slavery, Britain had already emancipated Black slaves throughout its colonies. This contrast triggered an enthusiastic response from anti-slavery Americans. Many looked across the Atlantic for inspiration on tactics and viewed British colonies as possible destinations for African American escapees from slavery.Footnote 65 However, the experiences of the Chinese at the hands of Britons reminded them that Britain might not be a sincere ally of the anti-slavery cause. Instead, it not only disrespected the vulnerable – just as pro-slavery Americans maltreated Black people – but also assisted the South under dubious pretexts. While highlighting American abolitionists’ resolve to achieve real equality for Black Americans, this critique revealed the Anglo-American rivalry for the title of the land of the free and established American abolitionism as significant for the colonized and oppressed worldwide. However, the contest occurred primarily between the British and white Americans, as the British emancipation could potentially diminish white American abolitionists’ moral authority among anti-slavery communities. For Black activists, no matter how insincere Britain was, emancipation had made it ‘an enlightened nation free of race prejudice’.Footnote 66
Many white American abolitionists did not view the British emancipation as a genuine expression of respect for human rights. Reflecting on the Opium War that Britain waged from 1839 to 1842 against China to legalize the opium trade, one Rev. Davis argued that Britain showed no regard for ‘humanity’. Because of this lack of genuine benevolence, it emancipated the ‘people of the West Indies’ only under the pressure of ‘the moral power of the people’. Since ‘our own Government’ was in a similar position, Davis asked American abolitionists to also ‘use moral action as necessary preliminary steps’ to end slavery.Footnote 67 On 28 October 1845, Caroline M. Trevor, a member of the Female Anti-Slavery Association of Hamilton, New York, cited Britain’s bullying of China to alert her colleagues to the indifference of the US government as well. She noted that Britain had ‘driven the ploughshare of war through the peaceful and sacred enclosure of China’, demonstrating that it was ‘maddened’ by its ‘love of wealth’ and ‘prowess in war’. Its aggression against China only revealed its ‘will’ to rob other peoples of their ‘inalienable rights’. As a similar ‘miasma has rested down upon our sunny South’ and the ‘serpents’ of enslavement were ‘coiled about the fair tree of our liberty’, the United States was also showing its ‘hideous head’, warned Trevor.Footnote 68
Some advocates of slavery insisted that enslavement had advanced the welfare of Black people. This theory was refuted by abolitionists, including William McMichael, who personally fought in the Civil War to end human bondage. In an 1856 pamphlet, he also cited Britain’s malicious intent behind the Opium War to argue that ‘Slavery is not adapted to produce good’. The Opium War had indeed ‘humbled the pride and tempered the haughtiness of the Celestials’ while opening ‘a great empire to Christian effort’, McMichael wrote. Nevertheless, the ‘motives which governed the English’ in attacking China still rendered the invasion nothing but ‘accursed’. Similarly, the ‘incidental’ good of slavery ‘cannot give character to the institution’ nor ‘be accepted as a compensation for its evils’, he firmly asserted.Footnote 69
Not only did the British government deviate from the principles of equality and brotherhood upheld by abolitionism, ordinary Englishmen were also apathetic toward the suffering of marginalized peoples, argued anti-slavery voices. Britons’ perceived indifference to China’s plight mirrored the American public’s lukewarm response toward abolition. On one hand, abolitionists believed that both the British and American populations prioritized their immediate interests over those of oppressed peoples. On 9 May 1850, the National Anti-Slavery Standard published a letter from Irish abolitionist Richard D. Webb expressing this perspective. During Britain’s ‘cowardly’ Opium War against China, Webb wrote, ‘a large proportion of the English people’ were indeed ‘dissentient’, but their opposition was not as strong as that ‘against an unpopular tax’. ‘In like manner’, Webb continued, ‘ninety-nine out of every one hundred Americans’ disliked slavery but would be ‘furiously angry’ with anybody who ‘attempts to prove his abhorrence by his actions’.Footnote 70 On the eve of the Civil War, The Liberator accused The Times, a popular British newspaper, of making ‘a deliberate attempt to justify slavery’ as it ‘justified the Opium War with China’. As ‘its clients for a while’, ‘violent Southerners’ felt encouraged to continue ‘the importation of kidnapped Africans’ and keep the South ‘degraded, demoralized, brutalized, and impoverished’, The Liberator stated.Footnote 71
On the other hand, the British public and pro-slavery Americans were both frantic in leveraging whatever means available to maintain domination over persecuted peoples, according to abolitionist opinions. On 4 April 1857, in another letter to the National Anti-Slavery Standard, Webb condemned ‘the religious portion of the British community’ for reconciling themselves to Britain’s use of ‘bombshells and cannon-balls’ against China. They believed that military force could introduce ‘the blessings of the Gospel of Peace’ to ‘the benighted millions of China’. Similarly, ‘plenty of pious souls’ among Americans looked ‘with complacency on the slave trade’, regarding it as ‘a somewhat rugged yet wholesome means’ to bring Africa ‘within the sound of the Gospel’, Webb observed.Footnote 72 Speaking in August 1861, Wendell Phillips shifted his focus from the similarity between Britons’ and pro-slavery Americans’ rashness to how the former exacerbated the latter. From China’s sufferings at the hands of Britain, he was convinced that the British ‘middle classes’ would not ‘rebuke very severely’ their government’s ‘useful crime’ of aggrandizing interests overseas. They would no doubt acquiesce in Britain’s scheme to ‘cripple and undermine’ the North by planting ‘a rival State at her side’, while the South was glad to be supported ‘openly or by stealth by England’, asserted Phillips.Footnote 73
In the abolitionist narrative, China not only witnessed Britain’s malice toward oppressed peoples but was also exploited by Britain to support American slavery – a ploy that reinforced perceptions of British hypocrisy regarding abolitionism. One means of assistance was arming the South under the pretext of supplying weapons to China, abolitionist opinions maintained. A Union officer during the Civil War, Benjamin F. Butler was also a champion of Black American rights. At a public dinner held in his honour by ‘some of the leading citizens of New York’ on 26 March 1863, Butler accused Britain of using China as a pretext for sending weapons to the South. ‘At Glasgow a steamer is being built for the Emperor of China’ and ‘at Liverpool another is about to be launched for the Emperor of China’, he quoted a rumour as saying. However, he jibed that until the British returned ‘the silk gowns they stole out of his palace at Pekin’, the Chinese emperor would not buy British ships. It was the Southern ‘rebels’ who were manning vessels ‘built by English builders’ to prey upon ‘our commerce’, Butler assured his audience. He urged ‘non-intercourse’ with Britain, ‘so that no ounce of food shall by any accident get into an Englishman’s mouth’. In that case, the British would have to really ‘write to the Emperor of China upon the subject’ of vessel building, Butler ridiculed.Footnote 74 On 17 April 1863, The Liberator cited ‘reliable authority’ as well to announce that Britain was building ‘some forty war-ships’ for the ‘Confederate Government’ of the American South. To feign innocence and avoid friction with the North, Britain claimed to be constructing these vessels for ‘the Emperor of China, or some other equally unlikely potentate’, The Liberator reported.Footnote 75
Meanwhile, Britons used China’s perceived cotton-producing ability to alleviate their misgivings about supporting the American South, abolitionists believed. Assuming that Britain’s dependence on Southern cotton had tied it to the South, abolitionists hoped that the potential availability of Chinese cotton might ease Britain’s concerns and divert its support from Southern secessionists. For instance, on 9 January 1858, the National Anti-Slavery Standard editorialized that Britain’s reliance on American cotton prevented it from offering ‘serious opposition’ to American ‘schemes of land-robbery and slave-extension’. This was a ‘state of dependence’ that was ‘galling to the just and natural pride of the British nation’. As ‘cotton-growing’ China was now under Britain’s ‘prevailing influence’, the Standard expected Britain to end ‘its subjection to the American Cotton Market’ and continue to lead ‘the van of attack upon the slave trade and upon slavery itself’.Footnote 76 However, Chinese cotton did not lead Britain to oppose the South during the Civil War. It felt instead more confident in supporting the Confederates, prompting abolitionist N. H. Whiting to exclaim that Britons were extremely irrational. They exhibited ‘an ignorance or malignity even more inexcusable and hateful than we have been disposed to charge them with’. The British were ‘the conscious, deliberate, but not by any means ingenuous allies of slavery’, whose only purpose was to ‘cripple, if not destroy, a formidable, and hitherto successful rival’. Due to this embrace of ‘the barbarism of slavery’, Whiting stated, ‘England – ANTI-SLAVERY ENGLAND (!!)’ did ‘not give us a very exalted opinion of her philanthropy, justice, or honesty’.Footnote 77
Not only did American abolitionists challenge Britain’s sincerity in opposing slavery, they also complained about British abolitionists’ narrow-minded interpretation of the values underpinning abolitionism. This defect was apparent in their attitude toward Chinese suffering. Abolitionist John G. Whittier admired British emancipation efforts, but he quickly discerned a flaw in British abolitionism that anti-slavery Americans needed to be wary of. As he put it in the National Anti-Slavery Standard on 17 December 1840, British abolitionists were reluctant to ‘adopt our new doctrines of human equality’ despite their friendship with American colleagues and their commitment to ‘the extinction of chattel-slavery’. One evidence was their lack of empathy toward the Chinese, who were ‘swallowing opium poison’ under ‘the guns of the British Navy’.Footnote 78
However, one should not conclude from this analysis that American abolitionists were ready to abandon the Orientalist approach toward China. They indeed accentuated the importance of compassion, but that was more an expression of condescension toward a backward Other than a genuine emphasis on brotherhood. Without intending to negate the hierarchy between the Occident and the Orient, white American abolitionists referenced China merely to highlight Britain’s failure to dismantle the very foundation of slavery. Beneath this criticism remained the abolitionist belief in the existence of a civilized and superior Occident contrasted with a weak and pitiable Orient.
IV
In a nutshell, China was a reference for anti-slavery Americans to accurately measure and graphically illustrate the degree of barbarity and insincerity among pro-slavery white people across the Atlantic. This role of China helps clarify at least two aspects of American abolitionism. On one hand, abolitionism did not merely involve confronting slavery directly. It also entailed skilful exploitation of the boomerang effect of whites’ superiority complex. China’s purported inferiority and weakness served as a warning to white people that they risked losing their cherished superior status because of slavery. On the other, the anti-slavery movement per se did not aim to challenge the Occident–Orient hierarchy. Despite their compassion toward the Chinese, abolitionists generally endorsed and, to some extent, reinforced existing condescension to China in an effort to assert their Americanness and persuade white society to rethink its position on slavery.
Situated within a broader context, this study unmasks a formerly ignored aspect of the abolitionist international that anti-slavery Americans envisioned. Manisha Sinha uses this terminology to foreground American abolitionists’ association of slavery with other forms of oppression and their commitment to liberating ‘all oppressed people’. They embodied ‘diverse radical passions’, including anti-capitalism and anti-imperialism.Footnote 79 While this observation is generally tenable, it overlooks abolitionists’ conservatism regarding civilization. As the current article illustrates, American abolitionists continued to divide the world along the Occident–Orient axis, perceiving the Orient as culturally backward and undesirable. Because of this perspective, they remained vigilant about other non-white peoples potentially diverting white America’s attention, which they believed should be focused on uplifting Black Americans. Of course, they did so not to justify Occidental or white domination but to secure Black slaves’ liberation and inclusion into mainstream American society. The abolitionist international favoured by anti-slavery Americans was therefore more complex and multifaceted than scholars have previously disclosed.
Funding statement
This research is supported by the Humanities and Social Science Fund of the Ministry of Education of China (Grant No. 22YJA770023).
Open access
