Fellows' Forum - Slavery's Cold Warriors: Britons, Americans, Slavery, and Ideological Conflict in the Age of Revolutions

The years between the cessation of armed hostilities between the United States and Great Britain in 1783 and their resumption in 1812 constituted a complex, shifting, and yet continual period of ideological hostility between most Britons and Americans. The advent and then radicalization of the French Revolution only intensified this Anglo-American fissure. British reformers and radicals, and American Anglophiles, complicated this picture of conflict, making it so neither nation was united in its commitment to the rivalry. But this ideological clash makes the term “cold war” applicable to this period of Anglo-American relations for many of the same reasons we apply it to Soviet-American relations in the latter half of the twentieth century. Unsurprisingly, British and American cold warriors of various stripes found slavery, as a concept and a reality, politically useful in a myriad of ways. Nationalists proved just as adept at appropriating abolitionist arguments as abolitionists were at appealing to nationalism. Partisan differences in both nations further complicated slavery's uses in this conflict. For instance, those seeking to tamp down or contain the contention embraced tactics like differentiating between the North and South as sections of the US. Rather than confirming contemporary historiographical emphases on racial consensus especially in the US, this paper (a chapter in my ongoing book project on the Anglo-American politics of slavery) emphasizes conflict and complexity as well as the connections between slavery and other issues.