John Oldfield

... Page 2. 154 THE SOUTH CAROLINA HISTORICAL MAGAZINE This street scene of Charleston depicting a black policeman appeared in Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper, January 21,1877, p. 341. lieutenants, six sergeants, and 150 privates. ... Take William Viney, for instance. ...

Kenneth Morgan, series ed. Robin Law, David Ryden, and John Oldfield, vol. eds. The British Transatlantic Slave Trade. 4 vols. London: Pickering & Chatto, 2003. 1632 pp. Endnotes. Index. 4 vols. £360/$540. Cloth. For historians of Africa interested in the impact of the Atlantic slave trade there is already a considerable body of primary material available in most major libraries. Besides the many travelers' accounts republished by Frank Cass in the 1960s, we have the invaluable four-volume edition prepared by Elizabeth Donnan seventy years ago, which includes a large number of archival documents in addition to extracts from contemporary books. More recently, Robin Law has published the first two volumes of what eventually will become a four-volume edition of the local correspondence of the Royal African Company's agents on the coast of West Africa in the late seventeenth century. This new publication makes a welcome addition to the existing literature. The texts are on the whole well chosen and representative. Altogether the original texts-facsimiles of contemporary publications-cover about fourteen hundred pages. They are supplemented in each volume by a lengthy introduction and shorter subintroductions to the individual documents (150 pages), endnotes (80 pages) and a thirty-page index to the whole set. Appropriately, the series begins with Africa itself. Volume 1, focusing upon the operation of the slave trade in Africa, is edited by Robin Law, whose introduction gives us an excellent review of recent literature. Most historians of Africa working on this period will have come across the four texts selected here. John Hawkins constitutes an exceptional case both with regard to the early date (1569) and because he deals with the direct participation of Europeans in the enslaving process. John Matthews's Voyage to the River Sierra-Leone (1788) struck me as a surprising choice, given that this book, nearly two hundred pages long, was reprinted as recently as 1966, albeit without annotation. John Adams's Sketches (1821), based on voyages made between 1786 and 1800, covers most of the West African coast. Law's annotation is helpful here, as it is for the excerpt from Gomer Williams's account of the Liverpool slave trade (1897), comprising papers on Old Calabar in the years 1767 to 1783. The remaining three volumes are more concerned with debates conducted in Europe, but they too contain material that is of significance for African history. Volume 2, on the Royal African Company, edited by Kenneth Morgan, comprises six texts written during the period extending from 1680, when the company first felt obliged to defend its special position (emphasizing, among other things, the benefits of the slave trade to England), to 1746, by which time the company, although retaining its forts in West Africa, had long ceased to supply slaves to America on its own ships. …

This article offers new perspectives on the commemorative events organized around the UK in 2007 to mark the bicentenary of the Abolition of the Slave Trade Act (1807). Drawing from the resources contained in Remembering 1807, a digital archive of information about nearly 350 events and exhibitions held in 2007, it offers a closer look at the variety, diversity and creativity of projects organized by heritage organizations and community groups from all parts of the UK. While agreeing that much of the national narrative focused on the celebratory aspects of Britain’s role in abolition, we argue that many other projects gave voice to a wide range of concerns relating to transatlantic slavery, challenging participants to rethink the boundaries of slavery and abolition in Britain’s public history. This included highlighting the role of transatlantic slavery in hitherto unexplored areas of British history, in local stories and in broader narratives of Britain’s commercial, military, and ...

... Cuba and Brazil; indeed, it was not until 1888 that Brazil finally emancipated ... 429; James Walvin, Making the Black Atlantic: Britain and the African Diaspora (London: Cassell ... sources and new methodologies, among them literary theory, anthropology and historical archaeology. ...

In 1889 the General Assembly of South Carolina repealed the state's Civil Rights Act (1870), following a protracted debate that had been prompted by the United States Supreme Court's decision in the Civil Rights Cases (1883). This article examines in detail the contours of the civil rights controversy in South Carolina and, in doing so, identifies a number of competing dynamics, among them outside corporate interests (in this case, railroads), local state interests, and regional loyalties. Taken together, these different factors demonstrate conclusively that civil rights in South Carolina during the 1880s was a contested space. They also shed important new light on the development of de jure segregation in the South and, in particular, the complex relationship between Jim Crow legislation and the social and economic issues related to railroad expansion.

In recent years we have become accustomed to thinking of abolition, and specifically the campaign against the transatlantic slave trade, as a grass roots movement.1 Narrating the history of the early abolitionist movement from below is problematic, however. Ideally, one would want the story to end in 1792 when the House of Commons resolved to abolish the British slave trade, albeit gradually, following a massive petitioning campaign throughout the length and breadth of the British Isles. But, as we know, 1792 proved something of a false dawn. Instead of following the Commons’ lead, the House of Lords insisted on hearing its own evidence for and against the slave trade, a delaying measure that left abolitionists playing a dangerous waiting game. Success finally came in 1807 in the shape of the Abolition Act, which outlawed the British transatlantic slave trade tout court. The intervening years are generally seen as a period of retrenchment, even retreat, on the part of British abolit...

In the 26 years between 1807 and 1833, Britain not only put an end to its involvement in the transatlantic slave trade, but also abolished slavery in the British Caribbean. These momentous events figure largely in the nation’s imagination and, indeed, its memory. But instead of seeing 1807 and 1833 as acts of closure, as happened in 2007 when the nation paused to mark the bicentenary of the 1807 Abolition Act, it is perhaps more meaningful to see them as part of a broader historical narrative (a specific national history) that spoke to and reinforced Britain’s tradition of humanitarian interventionism. Though it is sometimes easy to forget, Britain would retain a close interest in the slavery question after 1833, not least through its involvement in the suppression of the international slave trade. This complex history is perhaps best explained in terms of four broad and interrelated themes: humanitarian effort on the part of British abolitionists, official government policy, naval ...

2007 witnessed a remarkable outpouring of activity relating to transatlantic slavery: books, TV, radio programmes, exhibitions, themed events, blogs, conferences and plays. Just as importantly, much of this activity took place in centres not normally associated with transatlantic slavery, from Guernsey to St Albans. This lecture discusses these different commemorations, setting them in broader historical context and teasing out their wider implications, not least for those interested in questions of memory and forgetting. In particular, I want to look at the various ‘new’ exhibitions devoted to transatlantic slavery, at Bristol, Hull and Liverpool, using them to test some of the ideas I mapped out in my book, ‘Chords of Freedom’ (2007).

Part I. Building an Anti-Slavery Wall: 1. Networks 2. Circuits of knowledge 3. Strategies Part II. Abolitionism in a Cold Climate: 4. Rupture and fragmentation 5. Retrenchment Part III. A New Era: 6. Abolition 7. The revival of internationalism 8. Colonisation debates.

There is very little doubt that the Spanish-American War was a turning-point in US history. Victory ensured that for the first time the United States acquired an overseas empire and, with it, new responsibilities.1 The Spanish-American War also came to be regarded as a landmark of a different sort. Except for frontier skirmishes with the Indians, the country had not been at war for over thirty years. The Civil War, the United States’ most recent war experience, had torn the country apart. The Spanish-American War, by contrast, was hailed from the first as a war of sectional reconciliation. As Henry Cabot Lodge put it in The War with Spain (1899), ‘the war came, and in the twinkling of an eye, in a flash of burning, living light, [the people of the United States] saw that the long task was done, that the land was really one again without rent or seam, and men rejoiced mightily in their hearts with this knowledge which the new war had brought’.2

A collection of new essays, Imagining Transatlantic Slavery offers the latest research and thinking on current debates about the representation – past and present – of transatlantic slavery. Building on the interest generated by the bicentenary in 2007–8 of the end of British and American involvement in the transatlantic slave trade, our volume is interdisciplinary, drawing on history, literature and museum and heritage studies. Its focus is on the transatlantic nature of slavery and abolition, and the essays range from the seventeenth to the twenty-first century. Its distinguished contributors offer a critical view of the histories leading up to the defining decisions of 1807–08 and its complex legacies over the last two centuries. Essays on notable figures such as Phillis Wheatley, Olaudah Equiano, Hannah More, Benjamin Flower, and William and Ellen Craft are juxtaposed with those on early Quaker writing and the use of photography in abolitionist discourse. The last part of the book on 'Remembering and Forgetting' addresses debates surrounding the representation of slavery in drama, visual culture, museums and galleries, and appraises the importance of recent research to public understanding of slavery today.

CONTENTS List of illustrations Acknowledgements Introduction One Frames of Remembrance: Benjamin Robert Haydon and The Anti-Slavery Convention, 1840 Two Literary Memorials: Clarkson's History and The Life of William Wilberforce Three Sites of Memory: Abolitionist Monuments and the Politics of Identity Four Abolitionist Rituals: Celebrations and Commemorations Five Sites of Memory: Transatlantic Slavery and the Museum Experience Six Transatlantic Perspectives Conclusion Bibliography Index

CONTENTS List of illustrations Acknowledgements Introduction One Frames of Remembrance: Benjamin Robert Haydon and The Anti-Slavery Convention, 1840 Two Literary Memorials: Clarkson's History and The Life of William Wilberforce Three Sites of Memory: Abolitionist Monuments and the Politics of Identity Four Abolitionist Rituals: Celebrations and Commemorations Five Sites of Memory: Transatlantic Slavery and the Museum Experience Six Transatlantic Perspectives Conclusion Bibliography Index