Black maritime labor was essential to the capitalist world economy as European nations began to reconsolidate their Atlantic empires in the wake of the Haitian Revolution (1804) and Emancipation in the British West Indies (1838). British merchant vessels plying the waters of these lucrative Atlantic economies were often crewed by those colonial subjects whom they once held as commodities. Atlantic scholarship – most notably Paul Gilroy's Black Atlantic – has looked to the chronotope of the seafaring ship in its efforts to chart the cosmopolitan contours of the nineteenth century. For Gilroy, the ship gives figurative expression to a cultural and political remapping of modern racial formations that transcends the “boundaries and integrity of modern nation states” (4). Ships call to mind both the Middle Passage and the mercantile routes that joined the Americas with Europe, Africa, and the plantation zones of the Caribbean. For Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, black maritime circulation thus constituted one aspect of the “many-headed hydra” that unsettled the political sovereignty of European nation-states in the Atlantic world (31).

To circumvent this dangerous “Atlanticist radicalism,” southern United States lawmakers began enforcing specifically racialized “quarantine laws” to guard the waterways and thoroughfares into the slaveholding region (Gilroy 27). In 1822, South Carolina enacted the first of a series of laws “for the better regulation of Free Negroes and persons of color,” a law that targeted those engaged in the seafaring trade; Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, North Carolina, and Texas soon followed. Concerns over the maritime dimensions of the recently suppressed Denmark Vesey slave conspiracy, which purportedly involved seamen in the smuggling of insurrectionary correspondences to Haitian President Jean Pierre Boyer, prompted South Carolina to target all black sailors with its repressive new law (Bolster 193–94). The Negro Seamen Act charged that all black crewmen be imprisoned until their vessels departed the state under penalty of being sold as “absolute” slaves if their confinement fees went unpaid. Black mariners sailing under the protection of European nations, including Great Britain and France were likewise subject to this police law as coastal United States slave states acknowledged, in a negative fashion, the revolutionary possibilities of a black Atlantic dramatically reshaped by revolution, abolition, and emancipation in the Caribbean.

This essay explores two literary accounts from this lesser-known cultural history of the early black Atlantic to explore the significance of the nation-state and nationalism to an emergent anti-slavery cosmopolitanism. The following sections critically recuperate the literary afterlives of two black British sailors, Manuel Pereira and John Glasgow, who became – largely unbeknownst to them – pivotal to the British anti-slavery campaign and its cosmopolitan project of universal freedom. By the 1850s, stories of free black seamen imprisoned and sold into slavery through the cupidity of unscrupulous captains and southern police officers had become a common feature of British anti-slavery print culture, particularly in the Anti-Slavery Reporter. Published by Joseph Sturge's longstanding British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, the Anti-Slavery Reporter advocated the kind of universal freedom that transformed British anti-slavery into a worldwide human rights movement dedicated to the global abolition of slavery.Footnote ¹ These reform-oriented tales evinced a specifically Victorian understanding of anti-slavery cosmopolitanism in their efforts to embody what Amanda Anderson describes as an ethical universalism that also attended to the particularities of “concrete intercultural exchange” in the Americas (30–31). Anderson addresses a specifically British context, yet the transatlantic reform literature protesting the Negro Seamen Acts embraced a far less ambivalent form of the “critical cosmopolitanism” that she attributes to Charles Dickens's realist fiction. In the years following West Indian Emancipation, the circulation of black Atlantic sailors helped solidify the cosmopolitan ideals of British anti-slavery reform culture as it became a privileged site for humanitarian activity and ethical engagement with cultural and racial difference. In their print campaigns, anti-slavery reformers persuasively articulated their cosmopolitan ideal of universal freedom with an equally powerful sense of British nationalism in writings that sought to carefully balance philanthropic selflessness with national influence and moral sympathy with impersonal judgment.

Britain had begun to remake itself into a free nation after the legislated end of West Indian slavery, yet the seizure and enslavement of black Britons upon United States soil offered a critical counterweight to the nationalistic tale of British freedom. What did legal freedom mean if American laws like the South Carolina Negro Seamen Act disregarded the rights accorded to free British subjects? Accounts of these “kidnapped” sailors disclosed the terribly qualified character of British freedom as long as slavery continued on American soil. These cautionary sailors’ tales made it impossible for British abolitionists to address the problem of American slavery without also attending to the condition of black subjects throughout Britain's Atlantic empire. By exploring the archives of anti-slavery reform literature, this essay excavates the historical and geographical contexts from which British anti-slavery began to transform itself into a worldwide human rights organization. Memorials, lectures, novels, and pamphlets reveal how the campaign's cosmopolitan commitment to universal freedom emerged out of an equally powerful allegiance to and identification with the imperial nation-state.

Once the law went into effect in 1823, harbormasters began seizing and imprisoning, under threat of enslavement, all black crewmen once their vessels docked in Charleston Harbor. Not a single crewmember was left aboard a British vessel in one “very remarkable” case (Johnson 3). Few statistics exist for black British sailors enslaved in southern states, but the Anti-Slavery Reporter asserted, “upon the very best authority, that in 1851, thirty-seven British subjects were seized and incarcerated, and forty-two in the course of last year; and that there is no doubt of many free coloured British subjects having been sold into slavery under the operation of this law, all traces of whom have been lost” (“Coloured Seamen” 50). By 1856, “[i]t was shewn,” according to the Anti-Slavery Reporter, “that no less than seven hundred and thirty coloured seamen, for no crime whatever, were incarcerated in the Charleston prison during the short span of ten months” (“Coloured Seamen” 50). The South Carolina Negro Seamen Act thus plunged the United States into international conflict with two of its most powerful trading partners, Great Britain and France.

British and American sailors instigated a number of legal actions to challenge the constitutionality of the South Carolina Negro Seamen Act and secure its repeal. As the Liberator reported, any of these lawsuits would have tested “before the Supreme Court of the United States the legality of imprisoning such, when color and not crime was the only indictment to be found,” but South Carolina officials blocked all these cases from going before the federal high court (Kenny 41). The case of Henry Elkison was the first of these many unsuccessful British lawsuits. The British Consul brought charges against Charleston Sheriff Francis Deliesseline and petitioned United States Supreme Court Justice William Johnson for a writ of habeas corpus to release Elkison after authorities arrested him off the Liverpool merchant vessel Homer (Greenberg 311). Affidavits asserted that Elkison was a “native subject of Great Britain, born in Jamaica” and sailed under the protection of the Union Jack (Johnson 2). Elkison's defenders insisted that his arrest violated the United States Congressional power to regulate commerce with foreign nations and the 1815 treaty providing for the “reciprocal liberty of commerce” between the two nations (Rich 581; Hamer, “Great Britain” 7). Justice Johnson eventually dismissed Ex parte Henry Elkison v. Francis G. Deliesseline (1823) on procedural grounds, yet he admitted, in what was tantamount to a declaration of the law's inherent lawlessness, that Elkison's “right to his liberty” without “remedy to obtain it” was an “obvious mockery” of law (Johnson 11).

In the failure of Elkison, Britain continued to demand “redress and reparation” for the arrest and confinement of its black mariners, and lodged eight more petitions with the United States government for such “violent and unjustifiable act[s]” and “outrage[s]” (“Legislature” 261; Rich 581). When the British Consul in Charleston again protested the seizure of black seamen from British vessels, the Charleston Mercury flatly declared that the state's sovereign right to self-protection cannot be compromised for the sake of respecting the civil liberties of a few foreign nationals: “The safety of a whole State must be consulted, although it results in temporary inconvenience and annoyance to a coloured or even a white British seaman” (Untitled 2). Anti-slavery humanitarians and reformers increasingly turned to the “bar of public opinion” once they realized that a federal hearing would not be forthcoming and that the United States Congress, controlled by “slavocratic power,” would not act upon the issue. In the failure of law, they turned to newsprint, pamphleteering, and literature as they sought to enlist the “public mind” to do the work that legislators and jurists refused to do.

The Afterlife of Manuel Pereira

A new spate of transatlantic disputes over the incarceration of black British seamen erupted in the early 1850s, as Great Britain, pressed by an outraged public, increased its diplomatic efforts to secure the repeal of these Negro Seamen Acts.Footnote ² The British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society urged Parliament to “do its duty” to protect the “personal freedom of all British subjects, without distinction of colour” (Untitled, Anti-Slavery Reporter 73). Such outcries drew uncomfortable attention to the vexed status of black colonial subjects in post-emancipation Britain. Over the next few years of heightened protest, transatlantic anti-slavery print culture freely disseminated the stories of two sailors from the black Atlantic – Manuel Pereira and John Glasgow (examined in the following section) – as powerful symbols of slavery's inexorable workings, eventually leading to the law's modification in 1856 (“Slavery” 6). This revitalized campaign sought less to address the abstract points of law than guide public sentiment towards the harrowing plight of free black mariners in America. These reformers saw the law as a violation of British rights and challenged the nation's commitment to protecting the freedom of all its subjects. The British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society regularly devoted columns of its monthly publication to the “Imprisonment of Coloured Seamen” as it informed the public of the depredations perpetrated upon the nation's newly emancipated black subjects. The Anti-Slavery Reporter called on “the British press and public to demand from Government immediate measures to prevent future outrages of this kind” as it insisted upon “a definitive answer, whether the colored population belonging to this country and its various dependencies are to be treated as felons and slaves in any ports of the United States” (“Black Laws” 102). It also offered ample coverage of the Parliamentary deliberations over the case of sailor Manuel Pereira who became something of a cause célèbre when reports of his seizure and imprisonment on 24 March 1852 made their way back to London.

Pereira was a Portuguese sailor articled to service on the English brig Janson. Charleston officials arrested Pereira along with sailor Reuben Roberts, a native of Nassau in the British West Indies and cook aboard the English schooner Clyde. Perera's case was particularly effective at sensitizing British publics given that the Janson had been “driven into the port of Charleston in distress” (Untitled, London Times 4). The wrecked condition of the ship's arrival into Charleston Harbor was key in Pereira's case against the Negro Seamen Act. With his vessel destroyed, Pereira faced the prospect of indefinite imprisonment and eventual enslavement. These unexpected circumstances prompted George Buckley-Mathew, the newly appointed British Consul-General of the Carolinas, to challenge the South Carolina law, and he initiated legal actions on behalf of both men.Footnote ³

However, Counsel Mathew's efforts were suspended indefinitely. By June 1853, Parliament had decided to stop pursuing these cases. Charleston was one of the chief southern ports in the West India trade, and Britain had come to depend heavily upon this well-worn trade route.Footnote ⁴ Fears of rupturing its amicable trade relations with the United States prompted the British government to adopt a more judicious course towards South Carolina (Hamer, “British Consuls” 159–60). Parliament announced “that the Law officers of the Crown were satisfied that Great Britain had no ground for complaining of any infraction of treaties” (“South Carolina Laws” 4). The new British Secretary of Foreign Affairs, George William Frederick Villiers, Earl of Clarendon, transferred Consul Mathew to a “less lucrative and inferior” post in Philadelphia and directed his replacement to secure the relaxation of the South Carolina law through more conciliatory measures (“Imprisonment,” Monthly Law Reporter 165). In his November address before the state legislature, the South Carolina governor confirmed that “the cases of MANUEL PEREIRA and REUBEN ROBERTS, colored seamen, are settled.” South Carolina officials undoubtedly thought it had put to rest “the awkward case . . . that has been before the British and American public in more shapes than one” (Untitled, Albion 571). They could not, however, expunge Pereira from public memory, and, in the failure of law and diplomacy, a relatively unknown British writer, F. C. (Francis Colburn) Adams, would bring the case before “the bar of public opinion” for proper adjudication (Douglass 106).

Manuel Pereira; or, The Sovereign Rule of South Carolina was the first of a number of popular anti-slavery historical fictions written by the former Savannah Georgian newspaper editor F. C. Adams. From the little that can be pieced together of his biography, Adams was “an Englishman . . . [who] resided many years in the Southern States” and had been, according to the Anti-Slavery Reporter, “[o]fficially connected with one of the principal local journals, but was finally turned against slavery by what he witnessed of its atrocities” (“Manuel Pereira” 118). An unverified account in the Zion Herald claims that Adams,

The particular regional cadences and sectional politics of antebellum America fascinated Adams even after his return to Britain, and he captured them in a number of short and full-length works.Footnote ⁵ Advance praise from the New York Daily Times for Adams's third novel is particularly descriptive of his penchant for seizing upon records and documents to craft compelling histories of the present, touting Justice in the By-Ways, another novel set in antebellum Charleston, as “emphatically a work of our age . . . a history in the guise of fiction, history whose accuracy is attested by public records and State documents. Each character is a living reality” (“New Reform Novel” 3). Manuel Pereira, likewise, offered readers the merits of a legal treatise in the form of a “life-like” ethnographic fiction that, adapting Anderson's words to the American context, sought to strike a careful balance “between sympathetic immersion and detached analysis and judgment” (15).

Buell & Blanchard of Washington, DC, first published Manuel Pereira in the spring of 1852, as the international disputes over the South Carolina regulation became more heated, and the London publishing house of Clarke, Beeton, & Co. republished the novel in the following year (“American Writers” 82). In a manner resembling the “authoritative” paratexts of fugitive slave narratives, Manuel Pereira includes an exhaustive appendix that reproduces Consul Mathew's various petitions, his diplomatic correspondences with South Carolina Governor John Means, resolutions passed in the South Carolina Assembly, and local reportage from the Charleston Southern Standard and Charleston Mercury.Footnote ⁶

But legal documents such as these offered virtually no insight into the subjective experiences of those the law afflicted. The novel, therefore, provides one of the most sustained accounts of those free black seamen unwittingly caught up by the South Carolina Negro Seamen Act, as it asks its readers to consider the historical Pereira in the context of an ensemble of local and international social relations (Linebaugh and Rediker 74). Adams's novel, in what Ian Baucom describes as a “long, Atlantic genealogy of witness,” gave dramatic voice to the countless sailors who suffered silently under South Carolina's punitive regulation (194). “[W]e speak,” in the words of the “Introduction,” “for those . . . citizens to all intents (notwithstanding their dark skins) of the countries to which they severally belong – peaceable persons pursuing their avocations to provide a maintenance for their families, and entitled to the same protective rights claimed by more fortunate citizens of such countries” (viii). The Canadian Provincial Freeman lauded the novel for enabling “any politician, philanthropist, human christian, (as we have the opposite,) and loyal man, to see things as they are and exist, appertaining to that vilest of all trafficks and abominations, namely, the buying, holding, and selling of human beings.” “In such books” as Manuel Pereira, it declared, “THE ARMOUR OF THE ANTI-SLAVERY ADVOCATE CONSISTS” (“Review” n.p.).

Adams remakes the historical Pereira into a virtual Englishman to better illuminate the woeful limitation of British freedom upon American soil. “It mattered but very little” to the beloved Pereira, explains the narrator, “where he was born, for he . . . sailed so long under the protection of the union-jack of Old England that he had formed a stronger allegiance to that country than to any other” (11). Pereira's allegiance, according to this narrative, was due in part to England's cultural heritage of freedom, for “the flag was sure to protect his rights, and insure from the Government to which he sailed respect and hospitality” (11). Adams has the fictional Pereira repeatedly descant, in what passes for Portuguese inflected English, some variation of his comment that “I'm always sail in English ship, because I can get protection from flag and consul, where I go – any part of globe” (17). For Pereira, English sovereignty becomes a virtual passport to a cosmopolitan identity.

Once in Charleston, Pereira becomes an Englishman in elocution and manner if not by birth as Adams imbues him with a rhetorical fluency that rivals that of Frederick Douglass's Madison Washington in The Heroic Slave, replacing the Portuguese accent from the opening seafaring scenes with perfectly grammatical English once Pereira begins to defend himself against the depredations of the Charleston police. At the jail, the manacled Pereira protests: “It must be humanity that puts these symbols of ignominy upon my hands” and “confines me in a dungeon lest I should breathe a word of liberty to ears that know it only as a fable” (131–32). The English captain was a man who “never believed in making equals of negroes,” yet he too was suitably impressed by Pereira's earnest “reverence for the old jack” (21). His informal pledge to protect Pereira was soon to be tested as the Janson “floated a complete wreck” into Charleston Harbor (20).

Manuel Pereira was by no means a sentimental novel in the fashion of Stowe's popular Uncle Tom's Cabin, even though its publication, as the Anti-Slavery Reporter observed, “has created as great a sensation in Charleston as Uncle Tom has done all over the world” (“Imprisonment,” Anti-Slavery Reporter 1.8: 182). The narrative steadfastly refuses the resolutions of sentimental fiction even as it uses aspects of sentimentalism to “properly enlighten” the public mind (156). Characters in the novel, circumscribed by slave law and custom, cannot be moved to identify against their interests, as the novel thwarts the sentimentalist promise of a transformative inter-subjective engagement with another's suffering through individual acts of identification (Berlant 649). The novel thus cultivates a cosmopolitan detachment towards its subject matter that distinguishes it from other contemporaneous novels of anti-slavery reform.

Manuel Pereira depicts characters entirely bereft of the empathy usually found in sentimental fiction. “Everything,” according to the novel, “is made to conserve popular favour, giving to those in influence power to do what they please with a destitute class, . . . where the most unjust schemes are practiced upon those whose voices cannot be heard in their own defence” (343–44). Good-hearted, civic-minded southern characters ranging from the kindhearted jailor who supplements the prisoners’ meager diet with his own humble fare to the influential Charleston solicitor who befriends Capt. Thompson are all powerless to assist Pereira before the supreme authority of the law. These morally sound characters and their fruitless efforts to secure Pereira's release undercut the political efficacy of sentimentalism's moral injunction to “feel right.” Moral sentiment fails before the “same cold opinions about the law, and the faith and importance of South Carolina, and her peculiar institution,” and even the sympathetic heart of Mrs. Bird – the paragon of virtue from Uncle Tom's Cabin – could not sway, one jot, the strict construction that Pereira was, in the oft-repeated phrase, “contrary to law” (213).

Sheriff Grimshaw is all too happy to fall back on the “strict construction” of the law in Charleston: the law “was imperative, and no consideration could be given to the circumstances, for such would be virtually destroying its validity, and furnishing a precedent that would be followed by innumerable cases” (95). Grimshaw repeatedly appeals to the apparently objective authority of law to rebuff Consul Mathew's requests to release Pereira: “I never do anything inconsistent with my office. The law gives me power in these cases, and I exercise it. . . . I act for the State, and not for you” (190, 192). Mathew recognizes the law's sanction of Grimshaw's action, yet he critically observes that “[y]ou make all these legal inconsistencies a simple and most subservient life-rent to serve your own purposes, without giving them that broad view which looks to the general interests of our people” (194). Grimshaw may be a morally reprehensible character, but his repeated invocations of legal sanctions for his ruthlessness reveals that Adams's critique extends well beyond the realm of individual action.

“Jail,” according to the defensive sheriff, “was intended for punishment,” even though these black mariners have committed no crime. They are incarcerated simply for being “contrary to law” (215). Adams's repetition of this key phrase reveals that the law criminalizes not actions or deeds, but an entire class of raced persons. Grimshaw and his lackeys, whose sole interest lay “in the spoils of law,” shamelessly exploit the broad discretionary powers delegated to them by the state (202). They prey upon the vulnerable, and take the life of innocents like Tommy Ward, the petted English cabin boy and bosom companion of Pereira; unlike the orchestrated deathbed scene of Stowe's angelic Evangeline St. Clare, Tommy's death symbolizes neither transcendence nor sacrifice and brings forth no redemption or moral transfiguration at the novel's end. Leaving Pereira's jail cell well after hours, Tommy becomes lost in the labyrinth of downtown Charleston; policemen arrest him for vagrancy and thrust him into a dank jail cell where the boy, innocent of crime, contracts his mortal sickness. Charleston's lawless “contagion,” as Adams plies the discourses of public health and quarantine so long used to defend the Negro Seamen Act, reaches across the Atlantic to afflict and ultimately kill Tommy well after he reaches the shores of Pereira's beloved England (104). The novel thus insists upon the dangerous proximity of American slavery to British home life as it collapses the distance between the two countries.

There too is no final scene of redemptive reunion for Pereira and Tommy in the masculine universe of the novel. Pereira bathes Tommy's brow with “kisses of grief,” but he arrives at the hospital too late: “Life was gone” (352). Tommy “breathed his last as Manuel entered the sick-chamber,” and the novel concludes with his somber funeral procession (354). Loss mars Pereira's return to his adopted nation, and the novel ends in lamentation, “with a picture at once painful and harrowing to the feelings.” “We do this,” the narrator explains, “that we may be sustained by records in what we have stated, rather than give one of those more popular conclusions which restore happiness and relieve the reader's feelings” (351). The novel stubbornly refuses to leave the reader with any sentimental resolution: it cannot imagine a redemptive universe for the likes of Pereira or Tommy. In resisting the supposed moral edification of a sentimental closure, Manuel Pereira insists upon the need for legal and political reform while advocating an anti-slavery cosmopolitanism that eschews the pitfalls of what Charles Dickens satirized in Bleak House as “telescopic philanthropy” (31). Indeed, the novel re-presents its anti-slavery cosmopolitanism as a kind of domestic virtue as it likens abolitionist activism to the virtuous defense of Britain's imperiled manhood from the tragic fate of young Tommy Ward. Great Britain, the novel suggests, cannot hold itself aloof from the unfinished project of western freedom. British subjects – regardless of race – may not rest complacent upon their rights as long as slavery exists in the Atlantic world.

Manuel Pereira thus resists individual identification, the hallmark of the sentimental narrative, and its accompanying orchestrated scenes of suffering, to emphasize the institutional and economic mechanisms of state violence. Indeed, its relentless anti-sentimentalism only emphasizes the urgent need for some form of legal or legislative redress. As Capt. Thompson discovers, law becomes an easy rationale for men to act inhumanely despite their sympathetic words: “for while they all talked sympathy, they acted tyranny. Cold, measured words about niggers, ‘contrary to law,’ constitutional rights, inviolable laws, State sovereignty and secession, the necessary police-regulations to protect a peculiar institution, and their right to enforce them, everywhere greeted his ears” (201). Such passages implicitly critique the limits of moral sentiment to translate into individual action, let alone a course of diplomatic action.

Manuel Pereira powerfully galvanized international public attention towards the repeal and modification of these southern regulations. “Thousands,” according to the London Daily News, “are interested in this case MANUEL PEREIRA, and his cry for justice excites our ears to listen for what is said of such matters” (“From the London Daily” 1). The novel meaningfully individuates Pereira and other black sailors from the perspectives of the police, statesmen, and diplomats. Pereira becomes a figure invested with personal history, national loyalties, and subjectivity, and he offers a counterpoint to the oft-invoked specter of racial menace pervasive in South Carolina legal and legislative discourses. The Pereira fashioned in Adams's novel is a mild-mannered laborer incapable of the threat that police officials and legislators alike claimed was posed by free “foreign negroes” to the civic order and public safety of Charleston. Through his fictional retelling of the case, Adams manages to leverage public opinion in the absence of legal remedy.

Adams's campaign against the South Carolina Negro Seamen Act did not end with the publication of Manuel Pereira; he drew upon these Charleston cases in his lectures before the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society to enlist British nationalism in the cause of these imprisoned sailors. Such cases, Adams insisted in an impassioned 1854 address before the London Anti-Slavery Conference, signaled the expansion of American slavery into a “free” Britain. “Slavery,” in the figure of the Charleston police, “boarded British vessels, manacled British subjects, set at naught the appeals of Consuls, and made prison cells do the work of reducing honest freemen to the same level with her slaves” (Adams, “Paper” 34). Embedded in these discussions was a sharp critique of Britain's failure to defend the rights of its formerly enslaved colonial subjects as American slavery steadily encroached upon British sovereignty. The racialized subordination found in the South Carolina law, as Adams forcefully argued on page and stage, can only be understood as the perpetuation of slavery against British subjects whose self-ownership did not make them free. The popularity of Manuel Pereira was perhaps not surprising in a decade that, according to William Andrews, saw the dramatic increase of international public interest in the “romantic racialism” of Uncle Tom's Cabin, even though Pereira became a touchstone for a uniquely British anti-slavery cosmopolitanism (179–82).

Remember John Glasgow, A “Free-Born British Subject”

Manuel Pereira was just one of a number of popular cautionary tales of post-emancipation freedom that circulated among transatlantic anti-slavery organizations at mid-century. These accounts placed uncomfortable pressure upon the lawful liberty that Britain had purportedly secured to its black subjects, forcing the island nation to make sense of its Atlantic empire even as they deflected attention away from the growing political unrest in Britain's eastern empire (C. Brown 27). Reformers condemned the nation's inability to protect its own subjects against the depredations of American slavery. As evinced in Adams's rousing speeches on the subject, this reform literature specifically began to address the question of distance between Britain and the Americas. Its charged rhetoric increasingly marshaled English provincialism to impel audiences to think and act beyond the limited bounds of the British nation-state. Anti-slavery print culture thus marshaled British nationalism in complex ways to serve its cosmopolitan project of universal freedom.

This final section charts the curious circulation of another cautionary tale of British freedom to examine how transatlantic reformers re-appropriated South Carolina's rhetoric of self-preservation to secure British popular consensus against American slavery. The British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society specifically embraced another sailor's account – one far more mediated than Pereira's tale – to better illustrate the dangerous proximity of the current political crisis. Rather than remake a foreigner like Pereira into a virtual Englishman, black and white reformers began to rally around the figure of John Glasgow, a “free-born British subject” shorn of his freedom through the inexorable workings of South Carolina's “most barbarous and oppressive law” (“Case” 589). With fewer historical traces than Pereira, Glasgow presumably lived out the remainder of his life enslaved on a Georgia plantation, far from Liverpool where he had left wife and children, and most likely perished in slavery. His story, however, continued to live in speeches, pamphlets, newspapers, and a popular British slave narrative as a vivid reminder of the precariousness of British freedom in a partially free world. Countless American and British abolitionists summoned Glasgow in their efforts to rally the power of British public opinion against slavery on United States soil.

The British government's failure to protect the rights of its free black subjects elicited powerful outpourings of pathos and indignation. “Think, too, of poor John Glasgow,” Samuel J. May admonished the crowd gathered at the 1854 Manchester Anti-Slavery Conference, “stolen from a British ship by South Carolina officers, and now, if alive, wasting away his life as a South Carolina slave. Have the government and people of Great Britain done their duty by that man?” (May 38–39). Glasgow's story offered a powerful challenge to triumphalist narratives of British freedom that had begun with Somerset v. Stewart (1772), which established the doctrine of slave emancipation upon English soil. Glasgow's story begins in the familiar setting of England as readers and auditors follow the torturous passage of a free man into chattel slavery. Unlike the establishing scene of “natal alienation” that typically begins the fugitive slave narrative, the story presumes the reader's identification with Glasgow from the outset; it shares, instead, the formal emplotment found in variants of black British and American captivity narratives such as Robert Adams's dictated Narrative of Robert Adams, A Sailor (1816) and Solomon Northrup's popular Twelve Years a Slave (1853) (C. Adams li). By thus depicting the unlawful theft of freedom, British anti-slavery reformers more effectively insisted upon the United States institutional processes that made these free British subjects into chattel slaves.

A “native of Demerara, born of free negro parents, whose free condition he inherited,” Glasgow, according to the first iterations of his personal history, was an enterprising young man who took to the sea, quickly working himself up from cabin-boy to able-bodied seaman on the ship's register (Armistead 7). Various versions of the story take pains to show that Glasgow rejected the itinerancy of seafaring life to embrace full integration into British society ashore. He prospered, married a Liverpool lass, commenced farming, and returned to the sea only to “meet the expenses of a large family” (Armistead 8). Glasgow was thus a model of masculine providership, and he “engaged to go out to Savannah in Georgia, in an English vessel, and under a English captain” on what was to be (pathetically) his “last voyage to so distant a country” (Armistead 8). This unfortunate journey was to part Glasgow forever from his family and country, as the “black law of Georgia, like that of South Carolina is no respecter of freedom” (Armistead 9). The English captain turned out to be unprincipled, and since Glasgow was “‘only a nigger after all’. . . refused to pay the jail-fees, and set sail without John,” consigning him to the “auction-block” (Armistead 9). Glasgow suffered a life of unremitting psychological and physical subjection enslaved to his vicious new American master, Thomas Stevens. Unlike Adams's Manuel Pereira, graphically orchestrated spectacles of violence chart Glasgow's bloody passage from a “free-born British subject” to an abject American slave as Stevens brutally forces Glasgow to renounce his past in order to reconstruct him into a thing with neither history nor national identity. “Similar has been the fate,” cautions the Anti-Slavery Reporter, “of hundreds of others, black, brown, and white, free men and women, born on British, Portuguese, or any other soil, and of whose melancholy end their relatives have never learnt” (“John Glasgow” 148).

There was a witness to “tell the tale” of Glasgow's “agonizing case,” unlike the countless others that undoubtedly went unknown and unheard. An escaped slave “who was many years John Glasgow's companion in bondage,” related Glasgow's story to the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, which first published it on 1 July 1853 in the Anti-Slavery Reporter. The fugitive informant hoped that the publication of Glasgow's narrative “would lead to a discovery of the whereabouts of the poor fellow's English wife and children,” since he owed Glasgow “a debt of gratitude, for he it was who taught him to love and seek liberty” (“John Glasgow” 148). Glasgow's story, as mediated through this informant, bore out the inflammatory threat that South Carolina lawmakers had endeavored to prevent with its punitive anti-black police laws. Indeed, the law created the conditions of Glasgow's radicalization as it transformed him into the very figure of the proscribed “free foreign negro” that states like South Carolina had sought to cordon from its “domestic” slave populations. The enslaved Glasgow, in turn, “taught” the American slave “to love and seek liberty.” His presence radically altered the lives of those slaves whose status the Negro Seamen Act had mandated that he share. For their own purposes, the Anti-Slavery Reporter thus transformed the amorphous threat of black resistance so often exploited by slave states into its certainty.

British abolitionist Wilson Armistead immediately published a more embellished version of Glasgow's story in his Leeds Anti-Slavery Tract series, which the Frederick Douglass’ Paper republished the following year (“Den” 1). Armistead's version named the fugitive informant in London as one “John Brown.” This was the American fugitive slave Fed who renamed himself John Brown upon his escape to England, where he remained until his death in 1876. He dictated his experiences in slavery to Louis Alexis Chamerovzow, Secretary of the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, who edited and published the account as Slave Life in Georgia: A Narrative of the Life, Sufferings, and Escape of John Brown, Fugitive Slave, Now in England (1855). It was among a number of widely popular American slave narratives that were published in Britain and written for primarily British audiences, including those of Moses Roper (1837), William Wells Brown (1852), William and Ellen Craft (1860), and Jacob Green (1864). Copies were available for one shilling, and it was successful enough to warrant a limited second edition, which was later translated into German (Boney x). Glasgow's tragic tale is embedded within Brown's Slave Life in Georgia. The fourth chapter, “The Story of John Glasgow,” interrupts the first-person narrative in one of three chapters speculated to be primarily the work of Chamerovzow. “I must interrupt my own narrative here,” Brown insists, “to relate the story of John Glasgow. I had it from his own lips; and acting on the advice of the Secretary of the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, I have made a declaration in his presence, before a notary public, to the effect that, as given below, the narrative is substantially correct” (29). What follows is the verbatim text of Glasgow's story as it first appeared in the Anti-Slavery Reporter. Brown's duly notarized “Declaration,” dated 29 May Reference May1854 numbers among the many paratextual supplements included at the autobiography's end.

Unlike Manuel Pereira's resolute anti-sentimentalism, Brown's account of political radicalization through sympathetic identification with the black Briton helped reaffirm even while possibly unsettling, the prevailing narratives of British national culture. Brown found himself irresistibly drawn to the black stranger: “It was reported and believed amongst the slaves on the plantation that this John Glasgow had been a free British subject, and this circumstance . . . has tended to fix the following facts strongly in my recollection” (188). Their shared loss cements their intimacy: “He also felt for me in my grief at parting from my former relations, and endeavoring to console me as best he could, frequently spoke to me of his own previous history, particularly of his residence and relatives in England” (188). Glasgow's longing for kin and country incites in Brown a sympathetic yearning that re-establishes the nationalistic contours of British freedom. “These kind words from John Glasgow,” he recalls, “gave me better heart, and inspired me with a longing to get to England, which I made up my mind I would try and do some day” (24). Later chapters further emphasize the direct causal relation between these fugitive desires and Glasgow's stories of British freedom: “My mind had long been made up to run away” and “I was constantly dwelling on what John Glasgow had told me about freedom, and England, and becoming a man” (61, 64). “[G]etting off to England” became firmly fixed in Brown's mind, and he found himself in July 1850 “safely landed in the town where poor John Glasgow left his wife and children so many year before” (77, 141). “These are the facts,” Brown announces, “I thus learnt and believe” (188). Brown “returns” to Britain in Glasgow's stead as if to further emphasize the painful fungibility of black personhood under slave law while the historic Glasgow undergoes the transformation into abolitionist story.

Glasgow's cautionary tale of freedom offered British abolitionists the opportunity to further define their cultural identity against a tyrannous American nation, becoming, for abolitionists like Armistead, the groundwork for an ever more powerful national advocacy of a deterritorialized, and indeed universal, freedom. The events that befell Glasgow demanded British “interference” for, in Armistead's words, an “unscrupulous aggressive tyranny, such as the slave power has shown itself, endangers all its free neighbors; and therefore an ordinary regard for self-preservation should lead us, in our national capacity, to resist its assumptions” (Armistead 3). Distance does not soften the plight of these black sailors for they represent the British nation-state in their travels abroad. In this fashion, anti-slavery reform literature offers another critical route into Bruce Robbins's explorations of Victorian perceptions of ethical responsibility within “a dispersed global system” that had begun to exceed “experiential categories” (Robbins, “Telescopic” 214). Effectively balancing detachment with situatedness, anti-slavery humanitarians rhetorically wielded an ethical cosmopolitanism that could only be identified in relation to nationalism. American slaveholding was no distant struggle, but one that directly impacted the home. Anti-slavery reformers like Armistead used Glasgow's tale as an opportunity to expand Britain's “circle of duty” throughout the Atlantic world (Armistead 3). Slaveholding America simply cannot exist peaceably within a community of free European nations. In these acts of aggression against black British subjects, America threatens a uniquely British way of life. The proslavery doctrine of self-preservation is here mobilized for entirely different ends, as Armistead reshapes it into a rallying cry for the extension of British freedom to the Americas – which he sees as a “national obligation” (Armistead 2). Indeed, reformers often conjured the specter of the enslaved Glasgow to stimulate a collective sense of ethical responsibility towards the nation's black subjects.

The experiences of incarcerated seamen such as Pereira and Glasgow had a powerful discursive afterlife in the cosmopolitan anti-slavery campaigning of the 1850s, and reformers later attributed South Carolina's grudging amendment of its law substituting the confinement of black sailors to their vessels rather than to city prisons to the “well-directed and continued batteries of the Press” (“Imprisonment,” Anti-Slavery Reporter 5.3: 60–62). Black American abolitionist Samuel Ringgold Ward also appealed to these sailor's tales in the effort to incite British national indignation against American slavery. At different points in his transatlantic anti-slavery lecture tour, Ward was obliged to meet the “strong objections . . . that as there are no slaves in the British empire now, there is nothing for the British people to do on the subject” (290). In response, he persuasively summoned the specter of enslaved black Britons to activate national loyalties both within and without the nation. In Lincolnshire, Ward's stirring redaction of Glasgow's tale convinced his auditors to adopt a legislative petition in protest of these Seamen Acts.Footnote ⁷ Taking Glasgow as his text before the Fifteenth Annual Meeting of the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, Ward denounced these “odious law . . . made for the security of slavery” and reasoned that British abolitionism cannot be dismissed as “intermeddling with other people's affairs” when Great Britain has yet to address its “guilty complicity” in accommodating (and therefore, sustaining and perpetuating) these American slave laws against its own free black subjects (297–98). Such public iterations of Glasgow's tale successfully elicited emotional solidarities outside the nation that were, adapting Robbins's words to anti-slavery reform culture, “continuous with the emotions elicited in the process of nation building” (Cosmopolitics 7).

The stories of (actual and figurative) black Britons such as Glasgow and Pereira forced Britain to wrestle with its governmental responsibilities to those living in its far-flung colonies (C. Brown 26). Reformers like Armistead openly questioned the place of black subjects within post-emancipation Britain, and intimated that the national project of universal freedom was far from complete: “has not our Government a right to insist that all its subjects should travel when they please, in the territories of our allies, as long as they keep the peace?” He further denounced Great Britain for failing to live up to its own political ideologies: “As long as we suffer a million of our countrymen . . . to be excluded from entering the territories of our allies, simply and solely on the score of colour, we recognize the right to degrade those whom we have raised to political equality with ourselves, and show a cowardly falseness to our own convictions” (Armistead 4–5). The sweeping racial dimensions of the South Carolina Negro Seamen Act helped determine this two-fold appeal to a humanitarian anti-slavery cosmopolitanism that both transcended and reinforced national boundaries.

The anti-slavery cosmopolitanism outlined in the preceding pages yoked together politics, commerce, and affect in such as way as to bring Britain closer to America in unsettling new ways. Facilitating simultaneously national and supranational connections, the anti-slavery print campaign against the Negro Seamen's Act helped produce and reveal the human interdependencies that constituted the early Atlantic world forged in the global capitalism of the international slave trade. Transatlantic in scope, the print campaign sought to reshape the commercial and cultural ties that bound Britain to America and to its West Indian colonies. For these reformers, political activism began with the nation, yet transcended it in the name of a common humanity. They forged affective political solidarities that existed, in Robbins's critical adaptation of Benedict Anderson's “print-capitalism” thesis, both “within the nation and beyond it” (Robbins, Cosmopolitics 7). While redactions of Pereira's and Glasgow's stories used competing territorial allegiances to promote a cosmopolitan ideal of universal freedom, these various accounts also reveal the divergent, and at times contradictory literary strategies used by anti-slavery reformers to reach this goal. Some reform-mind writers, such as Adams experimented with literary form in their efforts to produce a critical cosmopolitanism that eschewed the sublation of difference found in sentimentalism's politics of sympathetic identification. In this fashion, Manuel Pereira presents us with an early example of what critics such as Robbins and Pheng Cheah have theorized as localized or situated cosmopolitanisms.

Reading anti-slavery reform literature through the lens of cosmopolitan theory opens up and further vexes our understanding of the constitutive ties that bind the local with the global. This essay charted the emergence of one form of Victorian cosmopolitanism, and its articulation with British national identity as it underwent a profound shift at mid-century. Anti-slavery humanitarians envisioned a world citizenship that involved an even greater obligation to a British national community composed of both black and white subjects. Such appeals to national forms of identification were strategic as reformers seized upon the nation as the most immediate and compelling platform for a political activism that would entail, “a dialogic expansion of concern to social circles beyond the closest and most familiar” (Scheuth and O'Loughlin 929). Black and white anti-slavery reformers from both sides of the Atlantic united behind this cosmopolitan ideal of universal freedom even as their efforts to secure the repeal of the Negro Seamen's Act also strengthened the imagined borders of their imperial nation-states. Abolitionists such as Adams, Armistead, and Ward argued that the futures of America and Britain were necessarily intertwined: black Britons such as Pereira and Glasgow, whether real or imagined could not possess absolute freedom without the universal abolition of slavery. Their stories roused British national subjects to strive towards the ideals of anti-slavery cosmopolitanism by showing that the problem of American slavery was too the problem of British freedom.