Contradictions continue to surround the historical intersection of Anglo-American capitalism and slavery. The contested relationship between free-trade ideology and transatlantic abolitionism sits high among them. This historiographical essay seeks to trace the many—and often conflicting—economic ideological interpretations of the transatlantic abolitionist impulse, including the understudied transnational role of Victorian free-trade ideology. By expanding the survey beyond the national level, the essay suggests as well that long-standing conceptions of free-trade ideology and abolitionism need reconsideration.

The transatlantic connection between economic ideology and abolitionism remains unsettled. From the American side, this has arisen in part because there is no consensus concerning the ideological motivations of American abolitionists. ^{Footnote 1} Some historians have suggested that American abolitionists did not subscribe to classical liberal ideas. For example, while granting that antebellum abolitionists “generally adhered to free trade economic ideas, sometimes radically so,” James L. Huston has argued that “abolitionists possessed a biblical political economy, not a classical liberal one,” a moral impulse that became diluted from the 1830s to the 1850s (2000, p. 488; 1990, p. 614). ^{Footnote 2} Paul Goodman has similarly portrayed American abolitionism as an oppositional religious response to the era’s relatively unregulated capitalist marketplace: “Abolition was a struggle to impose on social and economic relations the moral principles that were rooted in Christian teachings” (1998, pp. xiv, 140). The typical evangelical historiographical tradition goes even further than these interpretations in suggesting that American abolitionists were Christian reformers whose evangelical morality was in inherent opposition to market capitalism. ^{Footnote 3}

Neo-Marxist—or perhaps Marxish, as one historian recently called it (Rockman Reference Rockman2014, p. 447)—interpretations have instead emphasized the close American relationship between free trade and abolitionism in attempting to condemn both as legitimating forces on behalf of the laissez-faire antebellum marketplace; and thus for effectively enslaving the northern working class to industrial capitalism. With a heavy reliance on Karl Marx and Antonio Gramsci, the anti-slavery impulse is portrayed as a form of cultural imperialism or hegemony, skillfully enacted by way of the marketplace in order to ideologically inculcate the masses into a new industrial era of wage slavery. ^{Footnote 4}

Others still have attempted to reconcile economic ideology and American abolitionism by avoiding the Marxist condemnation of either the humanitarian anti-slavery impulse or the antebellum marketplace. Thomas Haskell, for example, has suggested that the peaceable elements of market transactions sparked a new-found humanitarian sympathy that led to abolitionism. This resultant sense of marketplace responsibility was then extended to a moralistic northeastern sense of responsibility to bring an end to American slavery (Haskell 1985 and Reference Haskell1985b). ^{Footnote 5} For others, the predominantly middle-class abolitionists in the United States subscribed to an economic individualism and anti-institutionalism that at times bordered upon anarchism (Perry Reference Perry1973; Elkins Reference Elkins1958, pp. 147–157; Forster Reference Forster2014). For these and many other scholarly works, abolitionists’ extreme laissez-faire capitalist ideas consequently led to strained relations with labor unions. ^{Footnote 6} Studies of nineteenth-century contract law, in turn, have emphasized the classical liberal motivations of abolitionism (Stanley Reference Stanley1998), and economic historians have only just begun to re-explore the close connection—rather than opposition—among antebellum tariff debates, transatlantic abolitionism, and religious revivalism (Meardon Reference Meardon2008).

On the British side of the abolitionist-free trade debate, too, we run into a historiographical quagmire. The questioning of the humanitarian impulse of British abolitionists can, of course, be traced back to the influential work of Eric Williams (Reference Williams1944), who acknowledged the confluence of free-trade ideology and abolitionism in England, but also suggested that declining profits from the transatlantic slave system, not humanitarianism, brought about the end of the British slave trade and Caribbean slavery in the early nineteenth century. This humanitarianism-in-decline motif remains a point of historiographical disagreement amid the official British shift to free trade from the 1830s to the 1850s. Some, such as Andrew Lambert, have concluded that British anti-slavery sentiment, even at the governmental level, remained “genuine and heartfelt” even after England’s turn to free trade in the late 1840s (2009, p. 78). Others have instead further questioned the humanitarian motivations of British free traders. The recent work of Simon Morgan, for instance, emphasizes the willingness of the Anti-Corn Law League (ACLL, 1838–1846), a predominantly middle-class English free-trade movement, to work with the slaveholding American South for low reciprocal tariffs. Morgan thus concludes that the free-trade leaders of the ACLL had “subverted anti-slavery’s moral authority” by the mid-1840s (2009, p. 89). Political scientists Chaim Kaufmann and Robert Pape go so far as to suggest that the British pursuit of free trade from the 1830s onward “actually conflicted with anti-slavery” (1999, p. 636).

Enterprising scholarship on the American side has recently been coming at this transatlantic issue from the other side of the political economic spectrum, by instead connecting abolitionism with mercantilism, and slavery with free trade. Matt Karp, for example, links free trade firmly to pro-slavery forces, suggesting that the international trade liberalization of the late 1840s was “an implicit acknowledgement of the primacy of slave-grown agricultural products.” Leaning upon the humanitarianism-in-decline narrative, Karp delves into the international and imperial dimensions of the South’s King Cotton ideology, and points to how southern free-trade advocates like John C. Calhoun correlated British anti-slavery sentiment with mercantilism, and looked with favor upon the English adoption of free trade in 1846 alongside the economic failings wrought by British emancipation and protectionism in the Caribbean. To southern expansionists, according to Karp, these various international developments “reflected a larger ideological transformation. The political economy of slavery and free trade had defeated the rival model of abolition and mercantilism” (Karp Reference Karp, Gleeson and Lewis2014a, pp. 37, 39–40). By the 1850s, the European elites’ embrace of “global free trade at the same time as they recoiled from global free labor” only confirmed “the triumph of slavery on the world stage” (Karp, Reference Karp and Shankman2014b, p. 420). Walter Johnson similarly explores how the 1837 US economic crisis had “led the defenders of slavery to renew their commitment to free trade” (2013, p. 289), and Charles Sellers and William W. Freehling have touched upon these interrelated issues with respect to the earlier Nullification Crisis (Sellers Reference Sellers1991, p. 320; Freehling Reference Freehling1966, p. 255). ^{Footnote 7} Brian Schoen, in turn, has demonstrated how Cotton South leaders’ antebellum economic ideas were grounded in a sophisticated, although ultimately flawed, understanding of the global economy. He also grants that antebellum southern slavery had largely become “enmeshed” with the Jeffersonian economic ideology of free trade. However, Schoen also shows that it was “in more subtle, complicated, and less all-consuming ways than have been previously suggested” by uncovering the South’s oft-overlooked growth in popularity of protectionist ideology, blurring the line connecting southern free-trade ideology and slavery (2010, p. 101). John Majewski has also explored this protectionist element within the southern slave economy (2009). Such complexity within antebellum southern economic ideology suggests scholars should remain cautious about conflating in toto pro-slavery sentiment (or anti-slavery sentiment) with the ideology of free trade.

These unsavory interpretations surrounding free-trade ideology and abolitionism are, some argue, further illustrated by the debate over free trade in West Indian sugar after British emancipation in the 1830s. Although some scholars have taken the English free traders at their word when they declared that free trade in the West Indies would advance the anti-slavery cause (Huzzey Reference Huzzey2010; Searle Reference Searle1998, pp. 58–63; Turley Reference Turley1991, pp. 148–149), most portray this episode as one of amoral, or even immoral, free-trade forces overcoming humanitarian abolitionist calls for Caribbean protectionism. ^{Footnote 8} According to the latter, by mid-century, one-time humanitarian abolitionists in England were now alleged to have discarded their moral sensibilities in order to maintain their support for the principles (and profits) of British free trade abroad.

The transatlantic role of abolitionist consumers in the early- to mid-nineteenth-century marketplace has therefore played a sizeable role in adding to the historiographical confusion surrounding free-trade ideology and abolitionism. For example, the American Free Produce Movement of the 1820s and 1830s at first glance might also be viewed as a protectionist-abolitionist movement, owing to its attempt to boycott slave-produced goods and to encourage instead the consumption of “free labor” goods. But even here, it gets murky, because, as Lawrence B. Glickman points out, the leaders of the movement were also supporters of a “truly free market” that would show free labor to be less expensive and more efficient than slave labor (2004, pp. 894–895, 898). Such classical liberal dimensions can also be found in free-labor consumer boycotts in England, as can the shifting nature of their moral responsibility (Huzzey Reference Huzzey2012b). British anti-slavery boycotters like Joseph Sturge similarly believed in the “ameliorative power of free market capitalism” (Sussman Reference Sussman2000, p. 188) and “the framework of a liberal political economy” (Turley Reference Turley1991, p. 149), in the long term, at least (Tyrrell Reference Tyrrell1987, p. 140). ^{Footnote 9}

Contradictory interpretations surrounding the relationship between Anglo-American abolitionism and economic ideology, humanitarianism, and the capitalist marketplace all fall short of explaining the strong transatlantic connections between Victorian free-trade ideology and abolitionism. In contrast to the contention that the dominant abolitionist economic ideology was biblical rather than classical liberal, for instance, many abolitionists did indeed draw ideological inspiration from the latter, in particular the mid-century, cosmopolitan, free-trade ideology derived from Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations (Howe Reference Howe1997; Palen Reference Palen2014a). Famously espoused by Anti-Corn-Law League leader Richard Cobden (1804–1865), this Victorian free-trade ideology correspondingly came to be known as Cobdenism: the belief that international free trade and a foreign policy of non-interventionism would bring about domestic prosperity and world peace. For these believers, free men and free trade were far from disparate goals. And Cobdenites numbered among the leading transatlantic abolitionists.

Through a transatlantic exploration of Victorian Cobdenism, rather than the more commonly studied Jeffersonian free-trade tradition of southern slave owners, the classical liberal intersection with abolitionism becomes more pronounced. The fact that, until at least the 1860s, some of the most prominent transatlantic Cobdenites were a regular who’s who of radical abolitionists has, until recently, received surprisingly little attention within abolitionist historiography. New studies have rediscovered the long-dormant transatlantic ties between free trade, Christianity, and abolitionism in the American North and Britain. ^{Footnote 10} For example, Stephen Meardon (Reference Meardon2008) has observed that it was more than coincidental that the evangelical Quaker Joseph Sturge founded the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society in 1839 at the same time that Richard Cobden organized the Anti-Corn-Law League—both around six years after the 1833 Emancipation Act at least ostensibly had ended slavery within the British Empire. Rather, Cobden and Sturge were representative of a growing alliance among Anglo-American abolitionism, free-trade ideology, and evangelism. ^{Footnote 11} Richard Huzzey (Reference Huzzey2012a) has similarly illustrated how, by the 1840s, the rise of Free-Trade England had not led to the fall of the British anti-slavery movement. The movement had splintered rather than declined; fractured rather than faltered. Though not “a nation of abolitionists,” Huzzey describes how Victorian Britain retained its humanitarian anti-slavery bona fides—and many of its most prominent abolitionist leaders stood at the vanguard of the ACLL fight for free trade. For example, W. Caleb McDaniel has connected more dots between transatlantic free trade and abolitionism, noting, for instance, how women of the ACLL staged free-trade bazaars, which gave direct and indirect encouragement to American abolitionists, and how Garrisonian pacifist Henry Clarke Wright, among others, had developed close ties with the ACLL in their mutual fight against slavery (2013, pp. 122, 165–166). The anti-slavery and free-trade work of Harriet Martineau also fits within this transatlantic network (Midgley Reference Midgley1995, p. 130).

As in Free-Trade England, the intersection of Cobdenism, evangelism, and abolitionism finds a similar intellectual pattern in the United States, and the pattern was purposeful. Richard Cobden, John Bright, and other leaders of the ACLL explicitly tied free trade and free labor together for its American anti-slavery audience. Cobden asked his disciples to “remember what has been done in the Anti-Slavery question. Where is the difference between stealing a man and making him labour, on the one hand, or robbing voluntary labourers, on the other, of the fruits of their labour?” (Meardon 2004, p. 212). The ACLL would even begin replacing “repeal” with “abolition,” as the latter contained more effective transatlantic resonance. The ACLL leadership also made sure to present their free-trade movement to international abolitionist correspondents in universalist religious and humanitarian terms. Cobden was quite clear on this point, noting that the league must appeal to “the religious and moral feelings . . . the energies of the Christian World must be drawn forth by the remembrance of Anti-Slavery.” ^{Footnote 12}

Examples abound tying Cobdenism to transatlantic abolitionism. British Cobdenite George Thompson, for example, was sent to the United States to draw abolitionism and free trade more closely together. To aid both the anti-Corn Law and anti-slavery movement, firebrand Thompson toured the United States, giving hundreds of speeches emphasizing the moral connections between Anglo-American free trade and abolitionism. ^{Footnote 13} More radical members of the American abolitionist movement held Thompson and his fellow “British Christians” in high esteem. With the support of their American abolitionist contacts, by the early 1840s, ACLL members like Thompson saw the possibility of an internationalization of free trade, beginning with the repeal of the Corn Laws “as a key” to anti-slavery advancement in America. Although it could not claim an ideological monopoly on Anglo-American abolitionist thought, the transatlantic abolitionist impulse was intimately associated with that of Victorian free-trade ideology. ^{Footnote 14}

Massachusetts Reverend Joshua Leavitt, leader of the anti-slavery Liberty party and editor of the abolitionist Emancipator, was particularly noteworthy for tying American abolitionism to Cobdenism. From the late 1830s onward, Leavitt came to see that overturning the Corn Laws in England would eventually shift British trade from the importation of southern slave-grown cotton to western free-grown wheat. “Our Corn Law project,” he wrote to Liberty party presidential nominee James Birney in 1840, “looks larger to me since my return after seeing the very land where wheat grows. . . . We must go for free trade; the voting abolitionists can all be brought to that . . . and the corn movement will give us the West.” ^{Footnote 15} With Leavitt’s new-found transatlantic inspiration, he thereafter focused much of his attention on overturning the Corn Laws by developing an American repeal strategy that would aid British manufacturers and northern farmers (suffering from scarce credit after the banking crisis of 1837), all while striking “one of the heaviest blows at slavery, by relieving the free states of their dependence on cotton as the only means of paying their foreign debt.” ^{Footnote 16} Leavitt further strengthened his transatlantic ties through his correspondence with his English abolitionist friends and through the creation of American anti-Corn Law organizations in the American Northwest and New York, providing much-needed transatlantic moral support for the ACLL and strengthening his connection to Cobdenism (Davis Reference Davis1990, pp. 180, 196, 202, 204; McPherson Reference McPherson1963).

Thompson and Leavitt were not alone in bringing the ACLL’s free-trade fight to American shores, as explored in my forthcoming book The “Conspiracy” of Free Trade: The Anglo-American Struggle Over Empire and Economic Globalization, 1846–1896. For instance, William Cullen Bryant, former Barnburner Democrat, Free Soiler, poet, abolitionist, uncompromising free trader, and editor of the New York Evening Post, also attended ACLL meetings in London during the 1840s. In admiration for Cobden, Bryant would afterward go on to edit the American edition of Cobden’s Political Writings in 1865, and would become an early leader of the subsequent Gilded Age American free-trade movement. ^{Footnote 17}

Arch-abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison was himself heavily influenced by George Thompson and other British free traders. As one abolitionist-turned-protectionist friend, Giles Stebbins, recollected, “Garrison and others of the abolitionists whom I greatly respected, inclined to free trade; for their English anti-slavery friends were free traders.” In later years, Garrison became a member and corresponded frequently with the Cobden Club upon its creation in 1866. Expressing his thanks to the club “whose honoured name it bears,” he wrote to them: “I do not hesitate to avow myself to be a free trader to an illimitable extent.” ^{Footnote 18}

Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts maintained particularly close mid-century ties with Cobden and Bright. Sumner first met Cobden in 1838 during a trip to England, and they developed a strong friendship in the decades leading up to and during the Civil War. Sumner duly became a strong advocate of Cobden’s quest for “Universal Peace.” In 1849, Sumner, seeking to inspire his audience of Free Soilers, reminded them of how the ACLL had brought together Tories, Whigs, and Radicals to repeal “the monopoly of the Corn-Laws. . . . In the spirit of these examples, the friends of Freedom have come together . . . to urge them upon the Government, and upon the country.” ^{Footnote 19} As Meardon observes, “in the broader context of peace and anti-slavery in which Sumner spoke, it was the rhetoric of Cobdenism” (2006, p. 216).

America’s first Cobdenites were an imposing group of abolitionists with strong transatlantic ties. Other American abolitionist leaders of the postbellum free-trade movement included Henry Ward Beecher, Edward Atkinson, Gamaliel Bradford, Ralph Waldo Emerson, William Earl Dodge, Parke Godwin, Benjamin Gue, Rowland Hazard, Edward Holton, James Redpath, Franklin Benjamin Sanborn, Thomas Shearman, Joseph Thompson, Francis Stout, Francis Vincent, Amasa Walker, and Horace White. Long after Cobden’s 1865 death, many of these American radicals would maintain correspondence with Britain’s Cobdenite leadership, and would continue to work toward bringing about Cobden’s universal vision of free trade and peace. These American friends of Cobden and Bright, these American subscribers to Cobdenism, headed the vanguard of Victorian America’s abolitionist and free-trade movements (Palen Reference Palen2013 and forthcoming). Again, this is not to suggest that all abolitionists were Cobdenites. Transatlantic abolitionists could certainly point to numerous economic nationalists among their ranks, as could southern advocates of slavery.

Why this continued disconnect within and between American and British abolitionist historiography? First, because many of the disagreements over the origins or motivations of Anglo-American abolitionism have arisen precisely from a desire to derive an all-encompassing intellectual motivation for abolitionism, even though there were multiple, and sometimes conflicting, ideological motivations for Anglo-American abolitionists. ^{Footnote 20} Some were driven principally by evangelism; others by pacifism; others by revolutionary Republicanism; others by economic nationalism; others by classical liberalism; still more by some combination therein. These disparities do suggest that historians should avoid attempting to completely align a particular economic ideology with anti-slavery, be it market fundamentalism or market loathing. They should accept that there were multiple ideological conceptions of anti-slavery, much as there were multiple conceptions of liberty (Huzzey Reference Huzzey, Hall, Draper and McClelland2014).

Second is the common tendency to halt studies of transatlantic abolitionism in 1865. As Caleb McDaniel has recently suggested, loosening the chronological end points might contain further revelations: “Today the neglected period of anti-slavery in America is not the first third of the nineteenth century, but the last” (2014, p. 85). Later trajectories indicate earlier sympathies. Relying upon the conclusion of the Civil War as end point has skewed American abolitionism, and overlooks the postbellum free-trade fight of former abolitionists to “unshackle” the fetters of American protectionism. ^{Footnote 21} The previously missed mid-century American influx of Victorian free-trade ideology—Cobdenism—was intimately tied to the antebellum transatlantic abolitionist movement, followed soon thereafter by the controversial politico-ideological struggle over American trade policy after the Civil War. For them, at least, it was but the next logical step in seeking the emancipation of mankind (Palen Reference Palen2013 and forthcoming).

Third, for those antebellum studies that do traipse into the postbellum era, their research has focused largely upon abolitionist work—or the lack thereof—on behalf of civil rights during Reconstruction. Yet, an even closer study of free trade and abolitionism in the postbellum era sheds added light on why Reconstruction-era civil rights largely failed. Many of these antebellum abolitionist free traders would become the postbellum reformist leaders of the Liberal Republican and Mugwump movements. With the slaves ostensibly freed, these laissez-faire reformers would come to view the federal occupation of the New South with abhorrence, a counterproductive and even immoral abuse of government power, much as they would come to view with disgust the mainstream postbellum Republican adherence to protectionism (Slap Reference Slap2006; Palen Reference Palen2013, 2014b, and 2015). The reformists’ laissez-faire faith would correspondingly shift from freeing men to liberalizing American trade. It is here, rather than in the antebellum era, that the case might more persuasively be made that free-trade advocacy led to a declining humanitarian interest in civil liberties for freedmen and freedwomen, as the moralistic condemnation of these former abolitionists shifted from the plight of former slaves to what they considered to be the protectionist enslavement of American trade.

Fourth is the common tendency to assume that antebellum abolitionist ideas arose within a national vacuum. ^{Footnote 22} The global turn within the history of capitalism and abolitionism offers numerous ways of surmounting this historiographical stumbling block. ^{Footnote 23} Bringing together the global history of capitalism with the global history of ideas (Moyn 2014) certainly looks promising. Comparative approaches to the historical intersection of economic ideology and nineteenth-century abolitionism could similarly yield fertile intellectual soil. How, for example, did the Anglo-American story of free-trade ideology and abolitionism compare to that of the Danes, the French, or the Australians (Røge 2013; Almeida Reference Almeida2011; Perry Reference Perry2014)? And what might happen if such comparative histories of abolitionism and ideology were coupled with McDaniel’s call for an extended chronological framework? ^{Footnote 24} The recent work of transnational scholarship on Cobdenism, the resurgence of the history of capitalism, and the interdisciplinary “global turn” illuminate that many avenues yet remain available for better understanding the intersection of free-trade ideology and transatlantic abolitionism.