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ABOLITION & EMANCIPATION
Part 1: The Papers of Thomas Clarkson, William Lloyd Garrison, Zachary Macaulay, Harriet Martineau, Harriet Beecher Stowe & William Wilberforce from the Huntington Library
BIOGRAPHIES
Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811-1896)
Born in Lichfield, Connecticut in 1811, Harriet was the daughter of Lyman Beecher, a Congregational Minister and Roxana Foote. After attending school and then the Hartford Female Seminary, she became a teacher before marrying Calvin Ellis Stowe, a professor of Biblical Literature, in 1836. Harriet turned to writing in 1843 primarily as a way to raise extra finance for her family; her first book The Mayflower being published in that year. Following the modest success of her first book, Harriet continued to write and in 1851 began the work for which she was to be best remembered, Uncle Tom's Cabin. Highly influenced by her religious upbringing Harriet felt the need to produce a work of moral significance and chose to write about slavery, the most contentious issue of the day. The phenomenal success of Uncle Tom's Cabin, selling three million copies by 1861, made Harriet Beecher Stowe internationally famous, and had a dramatic effect on public attitudes towards the slavery issue; Lincoln only half jokingly accredited the book with starting the Civil War. Having made her name with Uncle Tom's Cabin, Harriet continued writing and had many books published on a variety of themes. In 1856 her novel Dredd again attacked the evils of slavery, this work was followed by a series of stories based in New England that dealt with the lives of the early 'puritan' settlers, The Minister's Wooing (1859), The Pearl of Orr's Island (1862), Oldtown Folks (1869) and Poganuc People (1878). Harriet also wrote a number of novels on contemporary post Civil War American society, articles for journals, children's stories, household advice books, as well as a defence of Lady Byron (Lady Byron Vindicated, 1870) who she had met in 1856; in all she managed to write a book a year from 1862 until 1884. She died in 1896.
Thomas Clarkson (1760-1846)
Thomas Clarkson, the son of a headmaster, was born in 1760 in Cambridgeshire. After graduating from St John's College in 1783, he became interested in the abolitionist movement for which he remained a dedicated campaigner until his death in 1847. Having come to public prominence with the publication of his prize winning Latin essay on the subject of slavery in 1785, Clarkson soon became involved with other abolitionists, forming a committee to campaign for the outlawing of the slave trade in 1787. Later that year Clarkson visited Bristol and Liverpool and began to collect first hand information on the slave trade, the picture that began to unfold was worse than he had expected and shocked him deeply. His involvement with this committee led him next to France where in 1789 he tried to convince the French government to stop their country's participation in the trade. He later became vice-president of the Anti-Slavery Society which had been founded in 1823 to end slavery in the West Indies.
William Lloyd Garrison (1805-1879)
Born in 1805 in Massachusetts William Lloyd Garrison became one of America's leading reformers, campaigning on a range social issues including abolition. At the age of fourteen he became an apprentice printer at the Newburyport Herald newspaper where he also began writing articles. After finishing his apprenticeship at the Herald, he edited the paper for a few months, before moving to the National Philanthropist, a temperance newspaper based in Boston. It was whilst working on the National Philanthropist that Garrison became involved in the anti-slavery movement, chiefly through his friendship with Benjamin Lundy. By 1829 the two men had gone into partnership, publishing an abolitionist monthly journal the Genius of Universal Emancipation from Baltimore. it was not long, however, before Garrison's radical nature brought him into conflict, first with his partner Lundy who favoured a gradualist approach to abolition, and then with the courts who jailed him for libelling the owner of a slave ship. On his release Garrison returned to Boston and in 1831 founded what was to become the most influential of all abolitionist newspapers, the Liberator. Three years later Garrison backed up the success of the Liberator with the creation of the American Anti-Slavery Society, but his inflexible belief that the abolitionist cause must be fought in conjunction with various other social reforms such as temperance and pacifism, resulted in its rapid demise. By 1840 his disillusionment with society was such that he publicly burned a copy of the Constitution, which he saw as institutionalising slavery", describing it as a covenant with Death and an agreement with Hell".
After the Civil War and the 13 Amendment abolishing slavery, Garrison stopped producing the Liberator and turned his energies towards other social reforms that caught his imagination such women's suffrage and the prohibition of alcohol and tobacco.
He died in May 1879 in New York aged 73.
Zachary Macaulay (1768-1838)
The son of a Scottish minister, Zachary Macaulay, was first confronted with the realities of slavery when he was sent to Jamaica in 1784. After eight years in the West Indies, a number of which he spent as a plantation manager, he eventually came to oppose the system, returning to England to attempt to end the institution. In 1793 he was took the post of Governor of the Sierra Leone colony which William Wilberforce had established in 1788 for freed slaves. He held the post of Governor for six years, and then Secretary of the Siera Leone Company for a further nine years. In 1823 he was instrumental in the founding of the Anti-Slavery Society of which Thomas Clarkson was Vice-President.
Harriet Martineau (1802-1876)
Author, journalist, social commentator and leading feminist intellectual in the second half of the nineteenth century, Harriet Martineau is most noted for her economic, social and political contributions to the theories of her day including emancipation and the abolition of slavery, equal rights for women, better working conditions for labourers and agnosticism.
She travelled in America during 1834-1836 meeting political leaders, literary figures, historians and abolitionists such as Supreme Court Chief Justice John Marshall, President Andrew Jackson, Ralph Waldo Emerson and William Lloyd Garrison. On her return to England she wrote Society in America (1837) followed by other important works including How to Observe Manners and Morals (1838), Retrospect of Western Travel (1838) and The History of England during the Thirty Years Peace, 1816-1846 (1849-50). As a leading feminist, Martineau campaigned vigorously for women's right to work; women's right to education; sensible dress and health measures for women; fair working practices;the establishment of the first colleges for women, Queen's College in Harley Street London (1848) and the Ladies' College in Bedford Square (1849); in support of Florence Nightingale's school for nursing at St Thomas's Hospital in London in the late 1850's; throughout America at women's rights conventions and in London she wrote lead articles for the daily news in the 1850's. She supported and signed the first petition for the vote for women that went to Parliament sponsored by John Stuart Mill in 1866.
A remarkable women, a pioneer of British middle class radicalism; a writer, literary figure and dedicated journalist Harriet Martineau is a crucial nineteenth century commentator whose contribution to the women's movement and the abolitionist cause has for too long been neglected.
William Wilberforce (1759-1833)
Born in Hull in 1759 to a wealthy merchant family, William Wilberforce was to become one of the leading campaigners in Britain for the abolition of the slave trade. Wilberforce had long viewed the slave trade with distaste, but it was not until the 1780's following an evangelical conversion that he became committed to the abolitionist cause and its leading spokesman in Parliament. Having entered Parliament at the age of twenty-one, a friend of William Pitt, he devoted his time to the anti-slavery campaign with some measure of success. In 1789 Wilberforce spoke for three hours in the House of Commons following the Privy Council report on slavery, but despite delivering a forceful address, he was unsuccessful in convincing Parliament to abolish the slave trade, many sympathetic waverers being persuaded that abolition would be severely detrimental to Britain's commercial future. It was not until 1807, after twenty years hard campaigning, that Wilberforce finally persuaded parliament to pass a law abolishing the slave trade. It was also in this year that Wilberforce, Granville Sharp, John Venn and other evangelical reformers created the Clapham Sect to fight for various humanitarian causes. He was, along with Zachary Macaulay and Thomas Clarkson, a founder member of the Anti-Slavery Society. He was forced to retire from Parliament in 1825 due to ill-health, and died eight years later.
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