18 - The Antislavery International

Summary

Frederick Douglass spoke for many when he told a Glasgow audience, during his first visit to Britain, that the aim of the antislavery international was the construction of a cordon of antislavery feeling around the United States. It was bounded by “Canada on the North, Mexico in the west, and England, Scotland and Ireland on the east, so that wherever a slaveholder went, he might hear nothing but denunciation of slavery, that he might be looked down upon as a man-stealing, cradle-robbing, and woman-stripping monster, and that he might see reproof and detestation on every hand.”¹ The movement relied on the cooperation of people of good faith, men and women, black and white, committed to the destruction of slavery wherever it existed. It appealed to all classes and races, from the aristocracy of Stafford House, as J. Sella Martin a fugitive slave put it, to the “hard-handed working men of the great railway works of Stratford” in London’s East End.