“An ASYLUM from TYRANNY”: Slavery & the Anglo-American Politics of Asylum in the Late 18th & Early 19th Centuries
MHS Event
Matthew Mason, Brigham Young University
Comment: Francois Furstenberg, Johns Hopkins University
This seminar will workshop a work in progress.
The event is virtual and free of charge.
Although the new national relationship between the British Empire and the fledgling United States was fraught with conflict after 1783, many British and European reformers sought inspiration and refuge, rather than differentiation, from the new American republic. Quite naturally, the vast majority of Americans eagerly welcomed these Europeans’ fulsome praise for their nation’s political and social superiority to corrupt Europe. But the degree to which members of this transatlantic liberal community included slavery in their vision of things to be reformed in the Atlantic world varied greatly. In some the asylum trope nurtured a certain haziness around American slavery, while for others abolitionists’ appeals to rid this Eden of that snake resonated. Far from a racial consensus, therefore, European liberals’ pointed commentaries on American slavery divided white Americans.
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