Owing to a wave of scholarship on the Americas in the past two decades, scholars now know that the end of slavery in one locale had profound implications on its survival in another. In this panel, three scholars interrogate the meaning of abolitionism and investigate the limitations and opportunities abolitionists faced on transnational terrain.

Spanning the United States, British Empire, Mexico, and Brazil, this panel brings together scholars from different stages in their careers to engage in a a conversation that spans historiographic and chronological boundaries. Matthew Mason will explore a pattern of British military and diplomatic officials advancing antislavery on the ground, even if it was not sanctioned by British policy. Looking at the U.S. and Canadian borderlands around modern-day Detroit during the War of 1812, the paper will analyze instances of antislavery policy developing on the ground during military conflict. The paper thus grapples with what it might mean to include British military officials in a history of abolition, puzzling over why they acted more decisively against slavery in foreign policy realms than their counterparts did in domestic politics. María Ester Hammack will take up the question of who to include in the history of abolition by looking at the history of Mexico in the 1830s, which she notes is conspicuously absent in the literature on international emancipation. Focusing on the communications between Black abolitionist leaders in Philadelphia and officials in Mexico (whom she introduces as Mexican abolitionists) she will trace the very real connections between Mexico’s foreign policy in the first years of its independence and the abolition movement in the United States. Finally, Samantha Payne will grapple with the hemispheric dimensions of the process known as reconciliation which ended Reconstruction in the United States. Focusing on how Republican leaders engaged with the Brazilian abolitionist movement during the 1870s and 1880s, she shows how US actors broadcast a conservative vision of emancipation, one that did not include universal male suffrage. As the Republican Party abandoned freedpeople to violence and terror across the U.S. South, she reveals how its representatives abroad reinterpreted the history of U.S. emancipation to demonstrate the folly of extending political citizenship to Black people across the hemisphere.

Scott Heerman will serve as chair and commentator.

Spanning the 1810s to the 1880s, from Canada to Mexico and Brazil, this panel will explore the vast terrain of antislavery, puzzling over which actors to include in the history of abolition, and unpacking the consequences of telling such an expansive story.