Seeking Air Too Pure for a Slave to Breathe: Abolitionist Schism along Racial Lines and the British Refuge

Black Baptist minister Nathaniel Paul was grateful to those “patriotic” Americans who shut down Prudence Crandall’s Canterbury, Connecticut school when the Crandall dared to educate black girls in the same room and the same manner as white pupils. Writing from London in 1833, Paul declared that the mob’s “heroic” actions presented his British audiences with an unparalleled view of the true “condition of free people of color” in the United States. This paper explores the complicated status of the British Isles as a safe haven and a fundraising cash nexus, and an alternative place of permanent residence in the view of African American reformers during the middle third of the nineteenth century. Secondly, in light of the divisions within the American antislavery movement by 1840, it will analyze the apparent shift of many black abolitionists’ millennial hopes from the North American continent to the African portions of the British Empire.

“What a record could the victims of this terrible hatred present against the dominant race,” African American abolitionist Sarah Parker Remond lamented in 1866. “It will never be written. It can never be written.” If Remond could not bring herself to record the history of white American racism, plenty of her colleagues recorded with their feet by voting to steal themselves from slavery and sometimes to leave the U.S. for England. Once in England, many preached and wrote jeremiads against the millennial white dream of the Union of Northerners and Southerners. If home to its own form of white racialism and the headquarters of an expanding empire until the sun was always shining on British-dominated soil, Great Britain was a kingdom where African Americans at least and at last could breathe truly free air.