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

Reviewed by: Beacons of Liberty: International Free Soil and the Fight for Racial Justice in Antebellum America by Elena K. Abbott Alice Baumgartner (bio) Keywords African Americans, Antislavery, Emigration, Freedom Beacons of Liberty: International Free Soil and the Fight for Racial Justice in Antebellum America. By Elena K. Abbott. (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2021. Pp. 328. Paper, $29.99.) Beginning with one of the earliest petitions to Congress in support of African American emigration to Sierra Leone and ending with the American Freedmen's Inquiry Commission in 1863, Beacons of Liberty examines how abolitionists understood the opportunities for freedom and equality across the Atlantic world. Elena Abbott defines the concept of "free soil" broadly. In Beacons of Liberty, "free soil" refers not only to jurisdictions that promised freedom to enslaved people who reached them, but communities that held out the promise of equality to free African Americans. Abbott shows that the geography of freedom was in flux, as was the enthusiasm among the African American community to leave the United States. Although "free soil" havens rarely lived up to the hopes of African Americans who reached them, Abbott argues that these communities provided significant opportunities for enslaved people at the same time that they offered to Black and white abolitionists a tantalizing glimpse of multiracial societies outside of the United States. Beacons of Liberty details how abolitionists understood the geography of freedom across the Atlantic world. In the early nineteenth century, the [End Page 493] free Black population of the United States increased, while the rights accorded to African Americans plummeted. Denied the right to vote and increasingly restricted in their professional pursuits, free African Americans looked abroad for alternatives. Haiti was one destination, which captured the popular imagination after the 1816 publication of the Haytian Papers by Prince Saunders, a former teacher at Boston's African School, who claimed to be one of Henri Christophe's own agents. The Genius of Universal Emancipation also championed immigration to Haiti, until its editor, the Quaker abolitionist Benjamin Lundy, received permission from the Mexican government in 1835 to establish 250 African American families on 30 leagues in the Mexican province of Texas. But for many African Americans, Upper Canada was still the preferred destination, for its closeness to the United States and for its seemingly greater commitment to civil liberties and equal rights. Abolitionists, Black and white, were deeply interested in other societies that had abolished slavery. To investigate abolition in the British Empire, the American Union dispatched one agent, Sylvester Hovey, to the West Indies, while American Antislavery Society sent two: Joseph H. Kimball and James A. Thorne. In 1837, as a growing number of African Americans moved to Upper Canada, the American Antislavery Society sent an agent named Hiram Wilson to investigate. These official agents often privileged the views of white officials, and Abbott is careful to include the voices of Black emigrants like Western William, who wrote in The Liberator that Canada made good on its promise of "liberty and equality to all subjects alike" (133). In 1863, Secretary of War Edwin Stanton appointed a commission to determine how the federal government could assist enslaved people as they secured their freedom—and how it could avoid any negative social consequences. Although the commission spent most of its time conducting interviews in the South, its members also visited Haiti and Canada. Abbott argues that African Americans generally did not find the freedom that they hoped for in these "free soil" havens. Although abolitionists cheered the early end of apprenticeship in the British West Indies as evidence of that immediate abolition was superior to gradual emancipation, African Americans who immigrated to Jamaica found low wages, entrenched segregation, and limited access to education. Similarly, African Americans in Upper Canada experienced racism, particularly in rural areas. Abbott argues that the idea of these "free soil" havens was significant, even if they did not ultimately deliver civil liberties and equal [End Page 494] rights—and indeed they were. Yet the conclusion that these "free soil" havens came up short raises an important question. Faced with a set of imperfect alternatives, were some better than others? Were there, as historian Rebecca Scott puts it...

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