Months before Lincoln would declare the Emancipation Proclamation, the Rochester staff of the abolitionist paper Douglass’ Monthly quickly printed its newest issue. Featured among the February 1862 paper was a fiery speech by Frederick Douglass and a petition directed to Lincoln calling for full emancipation. Several pages into the issue was also a brief demographic census of the “14000,000 persons of African descent on this continent,” including over 4 million from Brazil, 1.5 million from Cuba, and over 1 million from the “South and Central American Republics.” Published in the context of a nation at war, the motive behind the publication of the census was clear: the African diaspora of the Americas consisted of a sizeable, great people. Such political allusions and connections to the hemispheric African diaspora, however, were far from uncommon in the age of abolition. From Rochester to Rio de Janeiro, people of African descent and their abolitionist allies across the Americas frequently appealed to each other’s struggles—and, remarkably, sometimes participated in them on their own terms. These actors understood that the battle for Black freedom was a hemispheric one.

This panel brings together three scholars engaging with the hemispheric scale of nineteenth-century Black politics in the age of abolition. The first paper “‘Take Refuge Under the Laws of [Colombia]’: Slavery, Emigration, and Political Abolitionism in the Hemispheric 1850s” by Yesenia Barragan explores how African American emigration to Colombia and Central America in the late 1840s and early 1850s, coupled with the passage of final abolitionist laws in the region, helped bolster the cause of political abolitionism in the United States. The second paper “Naval Warfare in a Slave Empire: Brazil as an Atlantic Battlefront of the U.S. Civil War” by Isadora Moura Mota turns to the Atlantic coast of Brazil, which emerged as an active battlefront during the U.S. Civil War. Following sectional conflicts on Brazilian shores and the actions of Afro-Brazilians, Mota’s paper reveals the extraordinary story of geopolitics and transatlantic abolitionism. Finally, the third paper “Worldmaking and the Meaning of Freedom in the Post-Emancipation United States” by Samantha Payne centers the mobilization of African Americans in defense of the Cuban Republic during the Cuban War for Independence in 1868. Payne’s paper proposes the framework of “worldmaking” to understand how African American activists saw the Cuban war as an opportunity to build a new international anti-slavery order.

The commentator and chair is the esteemed, multi-award-winning historian Manisha Sinha, the Draper Chair in American History at the University of Connecticut and the 2024 President-elect of the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic. Dr. Sinha’s recent book, The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition, won the Frederick Douglass, Avery Craven, James Rawley, and SHEAR Best Book Prizes, and was also long listed for the National Book Award for Non-Fiction. We expect that historians and scholars of race, politics, slavery, and emancipation in the United States, Latin America and the Caribbean, the Atlantic World, and the African diaspora will be interested in this panel.