The Ties that Bind

This Chapter looks in details at the close personal friendship between George Thompson and William Lloyd Garrison, from their first meeting in London in 1833 to Thompson’s death in 1878. It explores in detail Thompson’s loyalty to Garrison, a loyalty that in many ways alienated him from mainstream British abolitionists. The Chapter also discusses Thompson’s role in raising British support for the Union cause during the American Civil War. Part of the intention here is to set Anglo-American co-operation within a personal context. The friendship between Thompson and Garrison sheds important light on how personal bonds underpinned the wider transatlantic abolitionist movement, at the same time accentuating the importance of international co-operation, not simply as an idea but as a lived experience.

The Ties that Bind

This book explores the close affinities that bound together anti-slavery activists in Britain and the USA during the mid-nineteenth century, years that witnessed the overthrow of slavery in both the British Caribbean and the American South. Drawing on a wide variety of sources, the book sheds important new light on the dynamics of abolitionist opinion building during the Age of Reform, from books and artefacts to anti-slavery songs, lectures and placards. Building an anti-slavery public required patience and perseverance. It also involved an engagement with politics, even if anti-slavery activists disagreed about what form that engagement should take. This is a book about the importance of transatlantic co-operation and the transmission of ideas and practices. Yet, at the same time, it is also alert to the tensions that underlay these Atlantic affinities, particularly when it came to what was sometimes perceived as the increasing Americanization of anti-slavery protest culture. Above all, the book stresses the importance of personality, perhaps best exemplified in the enduring transatlantic friendship between George Thompson and William Lloyd Garrison.

‘A Blot on English Justice’: India reformism and the rhetoric of virtual slavery

Beginning in the late 1830s, a coalition of non-conformists, abolitionists, free traders, and disenchanted East India Company proprietors began to vocally challenge the exploitative policies of the colonial state in British India. Led by lecturer George Thompson, these reformers pursued a rhetorical strategy of associating groups who were converted into ‘mere tools’ by the Company abroad and the aristocracy at home. These monopolistic entities degraded Indian peasant cultivators, the British working classes, and princely sovereigns alike through forms of ‘virtual slavery’ that persisted in the post-Emancipation empire. In staging these protests, reformers ran up against an adversarial Board of Control and Court of Directors who obstructed their efforts to mobilize public opinion. Probing their agitation reveals the existence of a particularly combative strain of liberal imperialist thought that defied the political status quo.

Domestic Missionaries, Slaveholders, and Confronting the Morality of Slavery: Missouri v. James Burr, George Thompson, and Alanson Work, September, 1841

This article revisits the 1841 arrest, trial, and conviction of three U.S. abolitionist missionaries, James Burr, George Thompson, and Alanson Work, who were accused in Marion County, Missouri of attempting to “steal slaves.” All three were linked to the evangelical Quincy Institute across the Mississippi River in Illinois and were in Marion County to preach to enslaved persons and assist those who wished to run away to freedom. The article makes several linked arguments. First, local slave owners, who loaded the jury to assure a guilty verdict, spread the false story, which has previously been taken at face value, that the slaves themselves had voluntarily betrayed the abolitionists. Second, this story drew on a pro-slavery master narrative that depicted slavery as a benevolent, paternalistic institution and the enslaved as carefree children who loved their masters and spurned freedom. Further, the story enabled slaveholders to sidestep the moral condemnation of slavery on slave soil posed by the trial, national press coverage, abolitionist denunciations, and the Underground Railroad.