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What is “Western Civilization”?
Barbaric Civilizing Empires
Anti-slavery editors on England and Russia during the Crimean War
For those familiar with the history of abolitionism and anti-slavery politics in the Transatlantic world, it probably comes as little surprise that American anti-slavery newspapers took the side of the English and the other “Western Powers” coming to Turkey’s aid against Russia’s invasion of Ottoman lands along the Danube. England, after all, had abolished slavery in all its possessions and territories in 1838, and enslaved Americans seeking freedom could find it across the northern border in Canada, or by stepping foot on English soil anywhere in the world that their masters or their hired-out work happened to take them.
Thus, the July 5, 1855 number of Gamaliel Bailey’s National Era reported approvingly not only on English and allied successes in the Eastern War right but also on how a group of Jamaican freedmen successfully boarded an American vessel and brought an enslaved Black American to shore and therefore to freedom…
