Chartist thinking on slavery and abolition

I want to draw attention, a bit belatedly, to Tom Scriven’s excellent article on ‘Slavery and Abolition in Chartist Thought and Culture, 1838–1850’ for The Historical Journal.

This is the first comprehensive account of Chartist attitudes towards slavery and abolition, and certainly many early Chartists do not come out of it at all well. Influenced by the thinking of US president Andrew Jackson’s supporters, some adopted the view that wage labour was more exploitative than chattel slavery’, while alongside this there was a racist reaction to West Indian emancipation more extreme than has previously been acknowledged.

By 1842, however, various changes within the Chartist movement helped bring to the fore more consistently anti-slavery and even anti-racist sentiment within Chartist culture, as did growing exposure to American abolitionism, especially that of William Lloyd Garrison and Frederick Douglass. For this, the editor of the Northern Star, George Julian Harney, and the black Chartist William Cuffay take a great deal of credit.

The development of the anti-slavery ‘Free Soil’ ideology by American labour radicals also profoundly influenced the late Chartist position on slavery by inserting abolition into Chartist aspirations for land reform. Consequently, a core component of late Chartism was its own anti-slavery ‘Free Soil’ ideology, which informed pro-Union working-class agitation during the later American Civil War.

The full text of Dr Scriven’s article is available on open access. Download it in PDF.