<i>Beacons of Liberty: International Free Soil and the Fight for Racial Justice in Antebellum America</i> by Elena K. Abbott

Utilizing traditional historical sources, many of which have been digitized, Abbott offers scholars a deeply researched and well-crafted narrative of how international antislavery movements shaped the thinking of American activists. By the early nineteenth century, Canada, Mexico, and the Caribbean islands had begun to end slavery, and, as Abbott demonstrates convincingly, black and white abolitionists in the United States watched these changes in geopolitics with intense interest. Reversing the long-standing self-perception of America as a “shining city on a hill,” Abbott shows that antislavery proponents in the United States actually learned from, and took solace in, freedom movements across the globe.To create this persuasive and smoothly written study, Abbott followed two methodological tracks, one conventional and one only recently made possible by the digital proliferation of primary-source databases. The bibliography evinces deep research into abolitionist newspapers, correspondence, and reports. The Liberator, Nile’s Weekly Register, the New York Evangelist, and Frederick Douglass’ Paper are among the well-trodden periodicals that scholars have often analyzed to understand shifting ideologies within the antislavery movement. No study of American abolitionism would be complete without direct engagement with such primary sources, and Abbott has clearly read them all carefully. Yet, her methodology ventures further, into the vast digital databases available to researchers, such as collections offered by companies such as Gale, Readex, Proquest, and Accessible Archives. Abbott also credits publicly available digital archives, including the Colored Conventions Project, with rendering keyword searches a vital tool for historians. As Abbott writes in the book’s lengthy introduction, those searches can “reveal important patterns regarding how ideas circulated and were shared through an expanding print network” (18).The result of Abbott’s combined methodological approach is a study sure to enlighten the most seasoned scholar of abolitionism, primarily because of the book’s careful emphasis on how closely American dissenters followed world events regarding slavery and freedom. Through increasingly sophisticated print networks, including the wide circulation of newspapers, American protestors could keep abreast of global developments. They also supplemented print networks with missionary trips to recently emancipated countries to obtain firsthand experience of the implications and benefits of ending slavery. Information gleaned from print and travel shaped abolitionist arguments, ideologies, and expectations in fundamental ways.Seeking to combat southern proslavery ideologues, abolitionists pointed out that nations abolishing slavery hardly ever slipped into disaster or dislocation. On the contrary, Mexico and the Bahamas, for example, generally seemed to thrive in the wake of emancipation. West African settlements such as Liberia and Sierra Leone drew the attention of early advocates, such as Prince Saunders and Thomas Paul, counterbalanced by leading black citizens, including James Forten, who vigorously opposed the work of the American Colonization Society. Supposedly less successful models, like Haiti, were also studied for lessons. Most significantly, American abolitionists considered those lessons applicable to the American scene, sprinkling sermons, pamphlets, and reports with references to geopolitics.As Abbott clearly demonstrates, Upper Canada was arguably the most positive example of emancipation and a potential model for U.S. pioneers. Free-born Mary Shadd Cary settled there to aid in the formation of new communities for those escaping the American federal government’s return of self-emancipated slaves, especially in the wake of the venal Fugitive Slave Law of 1850. In this context, Abbot overstates the claims of northeastern and midwestern areas of the United States as “zones of freedom” (9). Recent scholarship emphasizes the precarious nature of liberty for the self-emancipated who settled in cities like Boston, Philadelphia, Detroit, and New York. The northern press could be as virulently proslavery and viciously racist as the southern papers were, as the white supremacist New York Weekly Caucasian showed all too well. An examination of the potent and highly popular anti-abolitionist periodicals available via the same databases that Abbott used would have provided insight into the ways by which global emancipation proved frightening for American whites. Democrats in New York City, for example, fed on a hatred of Haiti and other emancipated societies to generate mob violence in the antebellum era as well as to foment the Draft Riots during the Civil War.The real “beacons of liberty” lay outside the boundaries of the United States; the Canadian government, for example, refused to “extradite” fugitives from enslavement. Only by crossing international borders could self-emancipated people such as Henry Bibb feel at ease. This is not to say that post-emancipation societies were racial utopias; in fact, Abbott states that white residents of Upper Canada could be hostile to civil-rights claims, such as efforts to integrate public schools and public conveyances (205).Ultimately, Abbott’s comprehensive methodology highlights the “hopes, dreams, and expectations about freedom” that would help to formulate strategies for black and white antislavery activists as they combated proslavery arguments, fugitive-slave renditions, and the kidnappings of free-born African Americans (13). Attempting tirelessly to pierce the darkness of American slavery, abolitionists turned their gaze abroad to the far-away shining cities on foreign hills.

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