Matthew Mason

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Matthew Mason | The Battle of the Slaveholding Liberators: Great Britain, the United States, and Slavery in the Early Nineteenth Century | The William and Mary Quarterly, 59.3 | The History Cooperative

The Battle of the Slaveholding Liberators: Great Britain, the United States, and Slavery in the Early Nineteenth Century

TOWARD the end of 1814, the former slave colony of Haiti defied the newly restored French monarch's desire to re-colonize and re-enslave the island. "Never shall this execrable enterprise take place," pledged the subjects of the kingdom of Haiti to their sovereign, Henri Christophe. Their confidence rested on more than their own strength and will. "There is honour, there is glory among the Sovereigns and people of Europe," the address continued, "and Great Britain, that Liberator of the World, will prevent such an abomination!" Such flattery of George III's Britain may have seemed to some a surprise, given its recent warfare against Haitian independence, not to mention its nearby sugar colonies teeming with slaves. Despite such complications, leading Britons gladly accepted this flattery. The London Courier, the pre-eminent ministerial print forum, praised the fiery independent spirit of the address. It also noted that the Haitians styled Great Britain "the Liberator of the World, a title which no Nation can dispute or divide with us—and which no Nation ever deserved so well since the creation of the world."¹ At least one nation, however, disputed Britain's claim to the title—the United States of America. The Courier's pointed comments reflected Britain's rivalry with the United States, the only obvious claimant, after France's descent into Napoleonic despotism, for that title at the time. Furthermore, the place of Haiti in this particular episode highlights the importance of slavery in the transatlantic contest for distinction.

Both Britons and Americans claimed to be the standard bearers of human liberation in the Age of Revolution. As Britons formed their modern national identity, they drew on English traditions representing the inhabitants of that happy isle as the freest of all men. Whether setting themselves up in opposition to benighted Continental (and Irish) Catholics or later to anarchic American and French revolutionaries, Britons celebrated the ordered liberty that their political and religious institutions assured them.² Beginning with their Revolution, meanwhile, Americans had put themselves forward as the leaders in the cause of human liberty. In their loftier rhetorical flights they talked of America as an asylum for freedom in a world of despots. Oligarchy and a corrupt monarch had chased liberty out of Great Britain, but the American example had sparked libertarian revolutions from France to Latin America. The dissolution of republican idealism in Continental Europe under Napoleon had hardly shaken Americans' faith in their republican experiment; instead, it rendered their freedom all the more exceptional and their light all the more necessary in a darkening world.

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