Nineteenth-century abolitionists viewed their transatlantic activism as a simple strategy in which the circulation of facts about slavery in Great Britain could place effective pressure on slaveholders in the United States. But the 1844 case of John L. Brown, a South Carolina man sentenced to death for helping a runaway slave to escape, reveals that transatlantic abolitionist campaigns could still be hampered by lag times in communication, by the difficulty of confirming reports from the South, and, most of all, by damaging rumors about interracial sex spread by anti-abolitionist opponents. This article uses the Brown case, which prompted important changes in the strategies of proslavery southerners, to suggest the importance of studying not only those transatlantic abolitionist campaigns that succeeded but also those that produced outcomes other than those intended by abolitionists themselves. © 2013 Taylor & Francis.

abolitionism John L. Brown Slavery transnational social movements

[No Keywords available]