Gray, “‘Whisper to him the word “India”’: Trans-Atlantic Critics and American Slavery, ...

‘‘Whisper to him the word ‘India’ ’’Trans-Atlantic Critics and American Slavery, 1830–1860

E L I Z A B E T H K E L LY G R AY

En route from Cleveland to Cincinnati in the 1850s, Mr.

Darby, an Englishman, irritated his traveling companion—the Kentuck-

ian ’Squire Henry Gray—by noting his hatred of ‘‘abominable African

Slavery.’’ Gray responded that, while Darby claimed to oppose inequal-

ity, his government featured ‘‘a Queen, arrayed in royal robes . . . sur-

rounded by fawning ministers, and cringing sycophants,’’ and indeed

England had been the ‘‘foster father’’ of American slavery. To reinforce

his scorn for British criticism on the matter, he juxtaposed American

slavery and the British Empire. True, Britain had demonstrated ‘‘un-

bounded benevolence’’ to slaves who ran away to Canada. But it had

also authorized ‘‘the enslavement’’ of natives in India by chartering the

East India Company ‘‘for the purpose of conquering and annexing those

countries to its empire.’’ Darby was taken aback—‘‘How can you call

it ‘enslavement,’ ’Squire?’’—but Gray stood his ground. While Britons

lamented the plight of three million American slaves, he insisted, the

East India Company had amassed ‘‘£29,000,000 sterling’’ from ‘‘the

bones and sinews of the 160,000,000 natives subject to her power.’’ The

British criticized American slavery intensely, he pointed out, but seemed

to have no blessing for the nation’s ‘‘own suffering millions.’’1

Elizabeth Kelly Gray is an assistant professor of history at Towson University.She would like to thank Carol Sheriff, Edward Crapol, Chandos Brown, RobertRook, Patricia Romero, Omar Ali, and the anonymous reviewers of the Journalof the Early Republic for their helpful suggestions.

1. Henry James Field, Abolitionism Unveiled; or, Its Origin, Progress, and Per-nicious Tendency Fully Developed (Cincinnati, OH, 1856), 219, 226, 229, 227,228. Italics in original.

Journal of the Early Republic, 27 (Fall 2008)

Copyright � 2008 Society for Historians of the Early American Republic. All rights reserved.

380 • JOURNAL OF THE EARLY REPUBLIC (Fall 2008)

Gray and Darby’s conversation, featured in Henry James Field’s 1856

work Abolitionism Unveiled, was likely fictional. But it accurately por-

trays proslavery Americans’ tendency to use the British Empire to dis-

miss British criticism of the peculiar institution. Gray was eager to switch

the focus of the conversation from the Atlantic world to the world of the

Indian Ocean, and historians of slavery can also benefit by incorporating

this perspective. Scholars have explored many of slavery’s international

dimensions. Thomas Hietala has studied the significance of slavery in

debates over westward expansion. Robert May has described how white

Southerners sought to create a ‘‘Caribbean empire’’ in which slavery

would expand. And Howard Jones and Frank Merli have explored the

role of Europe—especially Great Britain—in the Civil War. Yet scholar-

ship on American slavery and the Indian world has included little be-

yond Indian competition in the international cotton market. But

American critics and advocates of slavery—as well as defenders of fili-

bustering—repeatedly defended their stances by noting conditions in

British India. For this reason, it is important to place American debates

about slavery and filibustering in the context of the Indian world. Such

attention enhances understanding of American beliefs and justifications

regarding slavery and filibustering that were publicly expressed and, one

can surmise, privately held. Many antebellum Americans closely followed

events in distant lands and saw them as relevant to their own. Slavery

became illegal in South Africa and India in the 1830s and 1840s, respec-

tively, just as America’s slavery debate was intensifying. American aboli-

tionists used these victories to bolster support for abolition at home.

They suggested that what was done abroad could also happen in

America.2

Yet as Gray’s rebuttal indicates, the Indian world provided fodder for

2. Thomas R. Hietala, Manifest Design: American Exceptionalism and Empire(Ithaca, NY, 2003); Robert E. May, The Southern Dream of a Caribbean Empire,1854–1861 (Baton Rouge, LA, 1973); Howard Jones, Union in Peril: The Crisisover British Intervention in the Civil War (Chapel Hill, NC, 1992); Frank J. Merli,Great Britain and the Confederate Navy, 1861–1865 (Bloomington, IN, 1970);Sven Beckert, ‘‘Emancipation and Empire: Reconstructing the Worldwide Web ofCotton Production in the Age of the American Civil War,’’ American HistoricalReview 109 (Dec. 2004), 1405–38. The present work seeks to place the Americanslavery debate in an international context, much as Beckert’s article did with cot-ton production.

Gray, ‘‘Whisper to him the word ‘India’ ’’ • 381

the proslavery side as well. The British East India Company had ex-panded its control of India over a period of two centuries and governeda large, nonwhite population. Consequently, many Americans saw as-pects of British India’s history as akin to both filibustering and slavery.The situations were similar enough to inspire many comparisons, yetsufficiently different to allow observers to reach widely different conclu-sions—even contradictory ones. Domestic issues strongly influencedAmericans’ views of foreign events. While abolitionists could point toBritish abolition of slavery to argue that their goal was attainable—andcould be realized peacefully—defenders of filibustering and slaverypointed to the British Empire to suggest that Britons lacked the moralauthority to criticize either one, as well as to normalize the Americanpractices. They argued that Great Britain was one of many nations thattreated people like slaves, and that Great Britain supported abolition inAmerica only because it would work to the British advantage.

The apparent resemblance between the American South and BritishIndia turned ominous in 1857, when India’s native soldiers—or sepoys—launched a massive rebellion against British rule that took more than ayear to suppress. Many Americans saw the uprising as akin to a hugeslave rebellion, and their opinions of slavery informed their takes on therebellion, with attendant issues—such as the audience they were address-ing and their attitudes toward empire—also playing a role. While aboli-tionists’ interpretations were tantamount to damage control, slavery’sadvocates used the uprising to insist on the need to maintain firm controlof American slaves, to preserve order at home. Although these commen-tators created a variety of analogies between empire and slavery, all real-ized that Americans could see in India a harbinger for the United Statesand therefore felt the need to shape those interpretations to their advan-tage. In this respect, Americans saw a foreign event through a domesticlens, much like they had seen the Mexican War ten years earlier. AsRobert Johannsen has noted, American critics of that war—often aboli-tionists or members of peace groups—saw the conflict as ‘‘inherentlyanti-republican,’’ while supporters saw war with Mexico as crucial inorder for republicanism to survive.3�

3. Robert W. Johannsen, To the Halls of the Montezumas: The Mexican War inthe American Imagination (New York, 1985), 279–89.


The United States was itself, of course, a product of the British Empire,

and after the American Revolution, the British expanded their Eastern

holdings. Patrick Brantlinger has pointed out that Britain’s loss of its

American colonies was ‘‘partly offset’’ by gains in ‘‘South Africa, Asia,

the West Indies, and Canada.’’ Emblematic of the change from the ‘‘first’’

to the ‘‘second’’ British Empire is Lord Cornwallis, who became India’s

governor general five years after he surrendered to George Washington

at Yorktown. Proslavery Americans who alluded to slavery in India were

usually referring—metaphorically—to the oppression of colonial subjects

under the British East India Company. Although one can contest their

analogy, the oppression—for financial gain—was real. As Timothy Par-

sons has noted, ‘‘Indians paid high taxes, [and] were captive consumers

of British products.’’ To increase their revenue, the Company turned tax

collectors into hereditary landlords who collected rent from tenant farm-

ers. Company officials hoped that the landlords would generate more

revenue by making production more efficient. Landlords did increase

revenue—there were strong returns in Bombay (present-day Mumbai)

and Madras, and, by the early nineteenth century, the Company received

almost half of the gross production in Bengal. But while revenue in-

creased, efficiency did not, and about a third of Bengalis saw their land

transferred to others. The Company also grew wealthy from its monop-

oly of the production of salt, opium, betel nut, and tobacco, and it used

its wealth to expand its control of the subcontinent.4

Despite their own anti-imperial revolution—and despite reports of

Company mismanagement—Americans admired the East India Com-

pany’s accomplishments. In 1600, Queen Elizabeth I had given the

Company’s 218 merchants and traders a monopoly on England’s trade

east of the Cape of Good Hope. The traders had begun with ‘‘two or

three trading factories’’ and in two and a half centuries had become ‘‘ ‘the

kings of the east,’ the lords of the soil, and rulers of the people from

Cape Comorin to the Himalayas,’’ according to a writer for Graham’sIllustrated Magazine. As imperial subjects Indians were neither enslaved

4. Patrick Brantlinger, Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism,1830–1914 (Ithaca, NY, 1988), 20; Timothy H. Parsons, The British ImperialCentury, 1815–1914 (Lanham, MD, 1999), 33, 37–40; Franklin and Mary Wick-wire, Cornwallis, The Imperial Years (Chapel Hill, NC, 1980), 24; Nicholas B.Dirks, The Scandal of Empire: India and the Creation of Imperial Britain (Cam-bridge, MA, 2006), 144–45.


nor free, which facilitated a variety of comparisons with other subject

peoples. In the New-York Daily Tribune in 1853, for example, Karl Marx

characterized Bengal’s peasant farmers as ‘‘wretchedly pauperized’’ but

‘‘not sunk as low as the Irish cottiers.’’ The British were surprised at the

ease with which they expanded their control of India, but conquest be-

came more contentious. The Company fought battles to annex the Pun-

jab in 1849 and deposed a native king in 1856 to annex the region of

Awadh. At the same time, the Company officials were changing ‘‘Laws

and manners, customs and usages, political organisations, the tenure of

property, [and] the religion of the people’’ in India, according to Benja-

min Disraeli, and they did so at a rapid pace. This broad attack on native

culture set the stage for the rebellion, which began in May 1857, when

native Indian soldiers responded to a purported British attempt to sub-

vert Muslim and Hindu strictures. In November 1858, control of the

colony moved from the Company to the British Crown. Yet Americans

remained in awe of British India. During the war, a writer for Boston’s

Unitarian Christian Examiner deemed India ‘‘the grandest foreign de-

pendency the world has ever seen.’’ And when the Company lost control

of the subcontinent, writers for New York’s Knickerbocker grew maudlin.

‘‘Even with all the faults and crimes of the defunct fresh in our minds,’’

they wrote, ‘‘we can hardly find it in our hearts to rejoice over its grave.’’5

Many nineteenth-century Americans had extensive access to informa-

tion about India, and some who wrote critically on the subject demon-

strated an impressive command of its history. The British shaped India’s

image to their benefit, according to Sara Suleri, but Americans often read

between the lines. In April 1858, for example, a writer for the NorthAmerican Review cited twelve books in arguing that the Company had

5. ‘‘The New Museum at the India House,’’ Graham’s Illustrated Magazine 53(Oct. 1858), 358; Karl Marx on Colonialism and Modernization, ed. ShlomoAvineri (Garden City, NY, 1968), 123; Bernard Porter, The Lion’s Share: A ShortHistory of British Imperialism 1850–1983 (London, 1984), 30–31; ‘‘The Revoltand the English,’’ Christian Examiner 64 ( Jan. 1858), 117, 122; ‘‘The Death ofa Great Power,’’ Knickerbocker 52 (Dec. 1858), 615; Antony Wild, The East IndiaCompany: Trade and Conquest from 1600 (New York, 1999), 8–10, 11; T. O.Lloyd, The British Empire, 1558–1995 (Oxford, UK, 1996), 148, 152, 174; Por-ter, Lion’s Share, 28, 39; Wayne G. Broehl, Jr., Crisis of the Raj: The Revolt of1857 through British Lieutenants’ Eyes (Hanover, NH, 1986), 49–50; Ainslie T.Embree, ed., India in 1857: The Revolt Against Foreign Rule (1963; 2nd ed.,Delhi, 1987), xii.


long governed India poorly, while analyzing the way in which five promi-

nent British journals and the London Times covered India’s rebellion.6

Meanwhile, American newspapers—which were catering to large audi-

ences, due to high literacy rates and improvements in print technology

that kept prices low—provided regular updates on the colonial war, al-

though those who argued that British rule in India was more oppressive

than slavery tended to describe British rule broadly. Readers’ interest in

such news can be measured by the fact that several papers reported when

European ships brought ‘‘nothing further’’ with regard to Indian events.7

Many historians have addressed slavery in the British Empire—

particularly in the Caribbean—as well as Britons’ change of heart in the

late eighteenth century. British slavers had transported almost three and

a half million Africans by 1807, but by then most Britons at home—some

moved by religious revivals and Enlightenment notions—found slavery

so odious that they not only wanted their own nation to withdraw from

the slave trade but also sought ‘‘to sweep the African and American seas

of the atrocious commerce.’’ As Niall Ferguson wrote of this epiphany,

‘‘it was almost as if a switch was flicked in the British psyche.’’ West

Indian planters and Liverpool slave traders were no match for abolition-

ists who enjoyed extensive popular support. Then, buoyed by their suc-

cess in ending British participation in the slave trade, the abolitionists

pushed to end slavery in British territory altogether. Under the 1833

Emancipation Act, slaves in the British Empire were freed, yet slave-

owners were to receive compensation, including financial considerations

to the tune of £20 million and six years of service from former slaves in

the capacity of apprentices, and slavery continued where the practice

was indigenous, such as in India. Due to difficulty in maintaining ap-prentices’ discipline, as well as growing pressure from various groups,colonial leaders abolished the apprenticeship arrangements in 1838.8

6. Sara Suleri, The Rhetoric of English India (Chicago, 1992), 7; ‘‘The Rebel-lion in India,’’ North American Review 86 (Apr. 1858), 488, 498–500, 491, 500–503, 504, 506, 507.

7. ‘‘Two Days Later from Europe,’’ Columbus (OH) Enquirer, Nov. 10, 1857;Johannsen, To the Halls of the Montezumas, 16; ‘‘India,’’ Boston Evening Tran-script, Jan. 11, 1858.

8. Niall Ferguson, Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Orderand the Lessons for Global Power (New York, 2002), 98, 95, 62–63, 96, 66, 97;Catherine Hall, White, Male and Middle-Class: Explorations in Feminism and His-tory (New York, 1992), 268.


After full freedom in the West Indies, abolitionists on both sides of

the Atlantic—and proslavery Americans—focused more attention on the

East. Writings at the time suggest that Americans on each side of the

slavery debate perceived Indian slavery as, more or less, comparable to

their own. In 1853’s The Planter; or, Thirteen Years in the South, David

Brown implored the ‘‘Ladies of England’’ to ‘‘make the wretched condi-

tion of your own Indian slaves, as comfortable as are our Southern Ne-

groes.’’ Opponents of slavery also used India to defend their perspective.

William Lloyd Garrison kept his Liberator readers apprised of efforts to

end slavery in India, in the hope that curtailments of slavery abroad

would increase abolitionist momentum at home. The subject of British

India appeared on the Liberator’s front page eight times in 1840 alone,

sometimes to the exclusion of almost all other news. Some Liberatorarticles, however, pointed to differences between American and Indian

slavery: The Rev. William Adam, a British abolitionist who had lived in

India, commented, for example, that ‘‘agrestic slavery [in India] prevails

in as deplorable severity as your own’’ but added that domestic slaves

were the norm in much of the colony and that some men sold ‘‘their

liberty to their creditors.’’9

Slavery was indigenous in India and was practiced by both Hindus

and Muslims in forms different from each other and different again from

U.S. slavery. But rather than referring to indigenous Indian slavery, pro-

slavery Americans called India’s natives slaves of the British Empire.

Meanwhile, American abolitionists did not clearly understand Indian

slavery, despite their attention to British abolitionist efforts there, in part

because most Britons themselves lacked a nuanced perspective of the

institution. British officials in India implored their countrymen at home

to understand that slavery in India was different from other incarnations

and could, in some cases, be considered beneficial.

The two forms of servitude, however, were not entirely distinct. Like

their southern counterparts in the United States, most Indian slaves were

born into their status, and ownership could be transferred through

inheritance. As in the South, some slaves did domestic work while

others were agricultural laborers. Owners used ‘‘ropes and canes as a

9. A Northern Man [David Brown], The Planter: Or, Thirteen Years in theSouth (Philadelphia, 1853), 149; ‘‘British India: Speech of Professor Adam,’’ Lib-erator, Feb. 14, 1840.


form of ‘moderate chastisement,’ ’’ the commissioners admitted, and late

eighteenth-century issues of the Calcutta Gazette featured runaway slave

ads that noted identifying features such as burn marks on the back and

chafe marks caused by a leg iron.10

Yet the differences in the two locales are striking. Although some In-

dian slaves had been brought forcibly from Africa, most were natives,

and slaves and their masters were overwhelmingly ‘‘of similar appearance

and origin.’’ Debtors risked becoming slaves to their creditors, and al-

though Indian slaves could be sold at will, evidence suggests that such

transfers rarely occurred, so families stayed together. Indian slaves’ func-

tion was often to reflect their owners’ wealth rather than to enhance it,

so slavery was not a capitalist enterprise in India like in the American

South and the West Indies; rather, it made owners’ lives more comfort-

able and was a form of conspicuous consumption that became all the

more conspicuous when slaves were dressed elegantly, to demonstrate to

visitors their masters’ ‘‘wealth and taste.’’ The status of slaves who

worked the land varied. While some endured close supervision and risk

of punishment akin to that of American slaves, most led lives that were

more akin to those of serfs.11

Slavery in India was but one part of the complex hierarchy—with its

network of obligations—that constituted Indian society. For this reason,

the service owed by a slave cannot be easily distinguished from what was

owed, for example, under the caste system. Hindus divided society into

a permanent hierarchy of five castes that, at the local level, were sub-

divided into scores of other groupings that determined status, occupa-

tion, clothing, and marriage partners. But caste could also determine

labor obligations. With jajmani, for example, neighboring families of dif-

ferent castes owed service to one another, and because both caste and

slavery were ‘‘based on notions of authority and subordination,’’ it was

difficult to determine where one ended and the other began. Even with-

out slavery, Indians would not be on equal footing. The Earl of Ellenbor-

10. Howard Temperley, ‘‘The Delegalization of Slavery in British India,’’ Slav-ery & Abolition 21 (Aug. 2000), 176, 175, 177; Indrani Chatterjee, Gender, Slav-ery, and Law in Colonial India (Delhi, 1999), 3n11.

11. Temperley, ‘‘Delegalization of Slavery,’’ 169; Chatterjee, Gender, Slavery,and Law, 130, 11; Temperley, ‘‘Delegalization of Slavery,’’ 173, 179, 177, 174;Mark Naidis, ‘‘The Abolitionists and Indian Slavery,’’ Journal of Asian History15 (1981), 148, 151, 146.


ough insisted that obedience to caste dwarfed all other forms of

deference. Enslaved Brahmins retained their high status, while for the

majority of slaves, who were of low caste, the difference between freedom

and slavery was far less stark than it was in the United States.12

Slavery also existed among India’s Muslims, although they sometimes

disagreed on legal aspects. Sunnis, for example, believed that a slave who

bore her master’s child could not be sold and should be freed upon her

master’s death, but Shias identified exceptions to these rules. Meanwhile,

different schools of Islamic law disputed whether the children of slave

mothers could be heirs of their free fathers. Other aspects of Muslim

slavery surprised British officials. Some masters privileged slaves over

their own blood relations because, while there were tensions with rela-

tives, they had the unstinting allegiance of those they owned. And al-

though eunuchs were slaves, they were respected and received stipends;

some even had slaves of their own.13

Conditions East and West also influenced the character of slavery.

While the United States had far more land than laborers, for example,

the reverse was the case in India, resulting in widespread poverty. The

scale of destitution in India made public relief unrealistic and limited

natives’ alternatives during famines. For these reasons, some British offi-

cials in India defended slavery as the best of an array of bad options for

India’s poorest. During an 1833 famine, for example, many Bengali

women sold their children for rice. Although the British commissioners

found the practice appalling, they concluded that such sales may have

been the only way to ensure the children’s survival. Commissioner C. H.

Cameron maintained that ‘‘Indian slavery’’ could ‘‘be regarded as the

Indian poor law and preventive of infanticide.’’ And Governor General

Lord Auckland implored members of Parliament not to eradicate a sys-

tem that in many cases provided ‘‘mutual advantage.’’ One must not take

their comments at face value. They were assessing slavery in British-

controlled India, where it was less onerous than it was in other parts of

the subcontinent, and both had an incentive to defend slavery. Given

India’s massive size, huge population, and complex culture, ending the

institution would have been ‘‘a Herculean task,’’ as Mark Naidis has

12. Temperley, ‘‘Delegalization of Slavery,’’ 180, 169, 170, 178, 179; Chatter-jee, Gender, Slavery, and Law, 7–8, 1.

13. Ibid., 141, 152, 42–43, 47–49, 55, 53.


observed. Nevertheless, their assertion that—as Auckland put it—use of

the word slavery could lead one to form ‘‘an erroneous idea of things’’

has validity.14

Despite the entreaties of Auckland and others, Parliament passed leg-

islation in 1843 that brought about the ‘‘virtual extinction’’ of slavery in

British-controlled India, according to Lord Fitzgerald, who oversaw the

East India Company. Yet de facto slavery endured, largely because most

Indian slaves lacked mobility, and many may not have learned of their

freedom. Indeed, some forms of slavery persisted in India at least into

the 1870s, and debt bondage has never been fully eradicated.15

Yet proslavery Americans did not refer to indigenous Indian slavery.

It had predated the East India Company, so Americans could not cite it

as more evidence of a British double standard, and Lord Cornwallis had,

in fact, sought to ban slavery while governor general but failed, in part

because it was sanctioned by Muslim law. That slavery was a Muslim

practice would also have disinclined proslavery Americans from empha-

sizing it, as most Americans regarded Muslims as immoral. In 1839, for

example, a writer for the North American Review suggested that, in Is-

lamic society, ‘‘human life has little value, and human faith still less.’’

Few Americans would have been mollified by the proslavery argument

that Muslims were enslavers as well.16�Meanwhile, American abolitionists believed that a free India could offer

a model for the United States and serve a useful economic role. African

American activist Charles Lenox Remond implored his British audiences

to complete the abolition of slavery in the empire and then promote

cotton cultivation in India, to lessen the profits of the American South.

Briton George Thompson, an antislavery advocate frequently featured in

14. Temperley, ‘‘Delegalization of Slavery,’’ 174–75, 176; Naidis, ‘‘Abolition-ists,’’ 156; Temperley, ‘‘Delegalization of Slavery,’’ 176.

15. Ibid., 183; Naidis, ‘‘Abolitionists,’’ 155, 156; Nancy Gardner Cassels, ‘‘So-cial Legislation under the Company Raj: The Abolition of Slavery Act V 1843,’’South Asia 11 ( June 1988), 85; Chatterjee, Gender, Slavery, and Law, 95; Tem-perley, ‘‘Delegalization of Slavery,’’ 186.

16. ‘‘Stephens’s Travels in the East,’’ North American Review 48 ( Jan. 1839),191; Chatterjee, Gender, Slavery, and Law, 2; Wickwire and Wickwire, Cornwal-lis, 95.


the Liberator, also favored this approach, hoping that Indian cotton

would ‘‘drive the American article out of the market’’ and that India’s

triumph would reverberate in the United States. In 1847, a writer for the

Liberator observed that Thompson’s efforts were ‘‘not merely’’ to as-

suage the ‘‘suffering millions of that vast peninsula,’’ but also to serve as

‘‘a way for the Exodus of the captives in our own house of bondage, to

whose deliverance he has devoted many of his best years.’’ These advo-

cates wanted their successes abroad to inspire change in the United

States.17

Yet defenders of slavery raised Britain’s involvement with the institu-

tion in India to attack Britons who challenged American slavery. Others

rejected foreign criticism altogether. During Thompson’s American

speaking tour in 1834 and 1835, slavery advocates denounced him as ‘‘a

foreign incendiary’’ and ‘‘an infamous foreign scoundrel.’’ Others saw

British involvement as not just meddlesome, but hypocritical. In 1840,

an American slave ship sought refuge in the Bahamas, and British au-

thorities freed the Africans aboard. In response, South Carolina Senator

John C. Calhoun asked how the British could condemn slavery—a situa-

tion in which ‘‘a body of men’’ held another group ‘‘in subjection’’—yet

approve of empire, in which ‘‘one nation’’ holds ‘‘another in subjection?’’

To Calhoun, in fact, the East India Company was at least as culpable as

American slaveowners. In a speech on the Senate floor, he insisted that

‘‘the whole of Hindostan’’ was ‘‘one magnificent plantation, peopled by

more than one million slaves,’’ and that the Company’s power over them

was ‘‘far more unlimited and despotic than that of any southern planter

over his slaves.’’ Like ’Squire Gray, Calhoun did not defend slavery.

Instead, he suggested that Britons held Americans to a higher standard

than themselves and therefore had no right to judge.18

That same year, Seeley & Glover law clerk E. W. Stoughton mocked

17. ‘‘George Thompson and British India,’’ Liberator, Dec. 3, 1847; RobertWilliam Fogel, Without Consent or Contract: The Rise and Fall of American Slav-ery (New York, 1989), 235; Jane H. Pease and William H. Pease, They Who WouldBe Free: Blacks’ Search for Freedom, 1830–1861 (New York, 1974), 56.

18. John Hammond Moore, ‘‘A Hymn of Freedom—South Carolina, 1813,’’Journal of Negro History 50 (Jan. 1965), 50; The Papers of John C. Calhoun, ed.Robert L. Meriwether, William E. Hemphill, and Clyde N. Wilson (28 vols.,Columbia, SC, 1959–2001), 15: 151, also quoted in Herbert Aptheker, Abolition-ism: A Revolutionary Movement (Boston, 1989), 28, 150.


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Great Britain as ‘‘that christian, slavery-hating nation’’ that forced Indi-

ans to grow poppies for opium production as ‘‘miserable slave[s] upon

the soil.’’ If the ‘‘whole enlightened world’’ were presented with ‘‘the

true features of American and British slavery, side by side,’’ he chal-

lenged, Great Britain would surely be deemed ‘‘guiltier.’’ Again, such a

response did not address the substance of the accusation but instead

suggested that Britons lacked the moral authority to criticize Americans

and that slavery, in a global sense, was not an anomaly. Although many

Americans demonstrated a keen understanding of British India, Calhoun

and Stoughton characterized Indians’ lives vaguely, perhaps because

they lacked any real evidence to suggest that empire was worse than

slavery.19 �In the 1850s, Americans responded in much the same way to British

critics of filibustering. Antebellum American filibusters, as defined by

Robert May, were ‘‘adventurers who raised or participated in private

military forces’’ for the purpose of ‘‘invad[ing] foreign countries with

which the United States was formally at peace.’’ American defenders of

filibustering pointed out its similarity to British aggrandizement in India,

in seeking to defuse British criticism and depict filibustering as normal

practice. James Stirling, an Englishman who traveled around the United

States in the 1850s, acknowledged a degree of hypocrisy in British con-

demnation of filibustering. In Letters from the Slave States, Stirling wrote

that many Louisiana farmers believed that, if they could move to Cuba,

they would work the land better than the Cubans. He suggested that

filibusters were criticized not because they were too ambitious, but be-

cause they were not sufficiently so: ‘‘When stealing is to be done at all,’’

he insisted slyly, ‘‘it should be done in public, and on a large scale; then,

like murder, it acquires a certain dignity: as witness our East Indian

thefts of a kingdom at a time.’’ Most Britons, however, did not regard

their empire with such candor.20

19. E. W. Stoughton, ‘‘The Opium Trade—England and China,’’ Hunt’s Mer-chants’ Magazine 2 (May 1840), 399; Dumas Malone, ed., Dictionary of AmericanBiography (22 vols., New York, 1928–1958), 18: 112 (hereafter DAB).

20. Robert E. May, Manifest Destiny’s Underworld: Filibustering in AntebellumAmerica (Chapel Hill, NC, 2002), xi; James Stirling, Letters from the Slave States(London, 1857), 127.


When Britons criticized filibustering, some Americans justified the

practice by insisting that other nations had acted in much the same way

and that British expansion in India was perhaps the grandest filibuster

of them all. Advocates of filibustering ‘‘normalized their country’s ag-

gressions,’’ according to May, by noting the similar behavior of other

nations. This strategy also helped them avoid addressing the merits of

the criticism. They saw ‘‘filibusterism’’ in Spanish activity in the Carib-

bean, Russian encroachment in China, and French actions in North Af-

rica, but ‘‘Above all’’ they saw it in ‘‘British adventures in India over the

past century.’’ And they saw it nowhere in India as clearly as in the

British seizure of the province of Awadh in 1856. By that time, the Mar-

quess of Dalhousie had been India’s governor general for eight years and

had greatly expanded the amount of territory under British control. His

methods—‘‘legally correct but morally wrong,’’ according to Margaret

MacMillan—included preventing adopted sons from inheriting their

fathers’ kingdoms. He deprived natural heirs as well when he focused on

Awadh, the ‘‘greatest plum of all,’’ a state with fertile land and a corrupt

king. Dalhousie interrupted the order of succession there, a move that

alienated the family and the many others whose livelihood depended on

them. Although Britons were indignant when other European powers

confiscated land, Karl Marx noted that their own country had seized the

‘‘independent’’ province of Awadh ‘‘violently . . . in open infraction even

of the acknowledged treaties.’’21

Soon after this annexation, American merchant George Francis Train

traveled abroad and complained of those who ‘‘believe[d] in the infalli-

bility’’ of the East India Company even while asserting that ‘‘American

slavery is horrible.’’ He summarized the Company’s position that ‘‘an-

nexation in America is robbery; in India, friendship and protection,’’ but

he saw the situations as analogous. ‘‘My fellow passengers all consid-

er[ed] the political fillibustering seizure of Oude [Awadh] a master stroke

of policy with the late Lord Dalhousie.’’ As May notes, Train had reason

to be annoyed at the British criticisms of filibusters because, while fili-

busters had extensive popular support, they lacked the imprimatur that

21. May, Manifest Destiny’s Underworld, 60–61; Samuel S. Cox, Eight Yearsin Congress, from 1857 to 1865. Memoir and Speeches. (New York, 1865), 126;Margaret MacMillan, Women of the Raj (New York, 1988), 97–98; Karl Marx,‘‘The Annexation of Oude,’’ New-York Daily Tribune, May 28, 1858.


the East India Company enjoyed. Filibusters’ actions were private and

illegal, whereas the Company had had the sanction of the British govern-

ment since its inception. When in 1857 a Briton criticized filibusters,

historian Hugh Blair Grigsby suggested that Americans ‘‘whisper to him

the word ‘India.’ ’’22

When Britons spoke out against slavery, the response of proslavery

Americans was much like that of those who defended filibusters—they

cited similar actions by the British. In 1857’s Modern Reform Examined,Joseph C. Stiles suggested that England should ‘‘hold her peace upon

the subject’’ of slavery and that Britons should dwell on their own na-

tion’s abuses:

[L]et her review her own conduct in India! Her treatment of China! Her botch-

work of freedom in the West-Indies. . . . Let her look nearer home, at her ThreeMillions of Paupers . . . the mass of whom would leap this day, to change places

with the slaves of the South.23

Criticisms of what was perceived as a British double standard intensified

as the slavery debate grew more rancorous. While opponents of slavery

highlighted British abolition, defenders of such servitude insisted that

slavery under British rule persisted in fact if not in name. In 1854, Sena-

tor Charles Sumner of Massachusetts criticized the Kansas–Nebraska

Bill, which would allow slavery north of the 36� 30’ line that had been

established in the Missouri Compromise. Sumner bolstered his argument

by noting international trends toward abolition. ‘‘Russia speaks for Free-

dom, and disowns the slave-holding dogma of our country’’ while, he

noted, in India ‘‘Slavery has been condemned,’’ likely referring to its

having been officially outlawed the previous decade.24

Proslavery Americans saw things differently. In February 1861, state

commissioners tried to begin the process of amending the U.S. Constitu-

tion. The goal of their convention—arranged by Virginia’s General

Assembly—was to safeguard slaveholders’ rights and thus prevent seces-

22. Geo. Francis Train, An American Merchant in Europe, Asia, and Australia(New York, 1857), 268, 349; May, Manifest Destiny’s Underworld, 61, 60–62.

23. Joseph C. Stiles, Modern Reform Examined; or, The Union of North andSouth on the Subject of Slavery (Philadelphia, 1857), 200–01. Italics in original.

24. Charles Sumner, Recent Speeches and Addresses [1851–1855] (Boston,1856), 261.


sion. At the conference, participants asserted that slavery was thriving

in British India. Thomas Ewing—a former Whig senator from Ohio

who had also served as Secretary of the Treasury and Secretary of the

Interior—insisted that, although Great Britain had fiercely ‘‘denounc[ed]

slavery in this country,’’ in India ‘‘slavery and misery’’ were far worse.

As with others who accused the British of hypocrisy, Ewing suggested

that the virtual slavery of empire was worse than practices in the Ameri-

can South. ‘‘In a single season,’’ he reported, ‘‘two hundred thousand of

her subjects were starved to death in one province of Hindostan.’’ Ewing

also recounted the devastating effects of the famine in Ireland and re-

minded his audience of American assistance to the Irish. Because of

Great Britain’s poor treatment of these groups, Ewing insisted that he

‘‘never will, favor any of these denunciations of southern slaveholders

and slavery.’’ Fellow delegate G. C. Bronson agreed. ‘‘True, they have

abolished slavery by name,’’ he acknowledged, but Great Britain ‘‘has

millions in India worse off than slaves’’ and was ‘‘the greatest land robber

on the earth.’’ Like Ewing, Bronson listed additional British abuses, in-

cluding its treatment of ‘‘apprentices from Africa, and Coolies from

Asia.’’ Highlighting Britain’s supposed faults enabled proslavery Ameri-

cans to deflect criticism and even to suggest that America’s ‘‘peculiar

institution’’ was not so peculiar after all.25�Having established parallels between the situations of India’s natives and

slaves in the United States—whether they focused on Indian slavery per

se or imperial oppression more generally—Americans imbued news from

India with real significance. This was never more so than with India’s

uprising—dubbed ‘‘the Great Mutiny’’—which to many Americans ap-

peared identical to a slave rebellion. The Indian Uprising quickly fol-

lowed the seizure of Awadh and was also a response to British

domination of Indian trade and government as well as fears that the

British were trying to subvert Indian religious beliefs. In May 1857,

native soldiers in Meerut began to fire on their officers, then burned the

25. L.E. Chittenden, A Report of the Debates and Proceedings in the SecretSessions of the Conference Convention, for Proposing Amendments to the Constitu-tion of the United States, held at Washington, D.C., in February, A.D. 1861 (NewYork, 1864), 143, 268, 9–10.


Europeans’ bungalows and killed their inhabitants. The next day, theywon over Delhi’s three sepoy regiments, murdering or expelling the re-maining Europeans. Within twenty-four hours, the sepoys had launcheda full-scale political rebellion. The conflict’s most notorious episode wasthe July 1857 massacre at Kanpur, in which Nana Sahib led rebels whokilled about two hundred British women and children and threw theircorpses into Kanpur’s well. Soldiers under General Henry Havelock de-feated Nana Sahib’s forces, then found the mass British grave. Havelockmoved toward Lucknow to relieve prisoners there but became a prisonerhimself. Like the massacre at Kanpur, the rescue of the prisoners atLucknow by Sir Colin Campbell became an iconic episode of the con-flict. The British had defeated all native forces by July 1858, and laterthat year the British Crown took control of India away from the EastIndia Company.26

Although U.S. manufacturers focused on the rebellion’s economic im-pact, other Americans were riveted by the conflict. U.S. trade with Indiahad grown significantly in the 1850s, due in part to crop failure in Eu-rope in 1853 and the Crimean War in mid-decade. Cotton-marketwatchers worried about the rebellion’s impact on American trade, al-though an economic depression at home was of much greater concernthan the rebellion. Meanwhile, many Americans were simply fascinatedby the colonial war. Despite such events as the violence in BleedingKansas and the Supreme Court’s decision in Dred Scott v. Sanford, awriter for Philadelphia’s Presbyterian Princeton Review insisted that‘‘The year 1857 will be henceforth known as the year of the SepoyRevolt.’’ In his opinion, ‘‘No event of the year in any part of the worldhas been of deeper interest in the eyes of thoughtful men.’’ A writer forNew York’s Knickerbocker agreed that ‘‘British India, in its fortunes andmisfortunes’’ was ‘‘arresting the current thoughts of all readers.’’ AndEliza Clitherall of Wilmington, North Carolina, believed that episodes inthe ‘‘Hindoo War’’ had ‘‘surpass[ed] the most thrilling accounts, Historyhas presented.’’27

26. David Brion Davis, Slavery and Human Progress (New York, 1984), 249;Embree, India in 1857, 4–7; Broehl, Crisis of the Raj, 49–52, 137–41, 151–52,155, 255; Eric Stokes, The Peasant Armed: The Indian Revolt of 1857, ed. C. A.Bayly (Oxford, UK, 1986), 17, 19; Brantlinger, Rule of Darkness, 201; Wild, EastIndia Company, 177.

27. ‘‘The Revolt of the Sepoys,’’ Princeton Review 30 (Jan. 1858), 27; ‘‘TheAmours of Warren Hastings,’’ Knickerbocker 51 (Mar. 1858), 313; Elizabeth Fox-


To some, British actions in India—and the subsequent rebellion—

strongly resembled American slavery and a slave rebellion. The two were

not identical but were sufficiently similar to allow many Americans to

draw analogies, although they often came to different conclusions. As

with the filibuster comparisons, some of the analogies of empire and

slavery reacted to British criticisms of American practices. James Wil-

liams, who had served as U.S. minister to Turkey, acknowledged that

the British had not ‘‘absolutely reduced’’ Indians to slavery, in a physical

sense, but insisted that the ‘‘history of one day’’ in India ‘‘would furnish

a record of more misery, more destitution, more utter, hopeless, unpitied

wretchedness . . . than would the history of an entire generation of all theAfrican slaves, which [Britain’s] pseudo-philanthropy would set free.’’

Congressman Samuel S. Cox marveled that ‘‘Every steamer brings us a

lecture from Exeter Hall on our slave propagandist filibusterism,’’ when

‘‘the British regime in India was a system of torture more exquisite than

regal or spiritual tyranny ever before devised.’’ As with ’Squire Gray’s

response to Mr. Darby, these men diverted attention toward alleged Brit-

ish malfeasance. In so doing, they avoided addressing domestic policies,

and dwelled instead on their critics’ faults. Perhaps they also took solace

in the notion that a higher standard of morality was unattainable, because

no one’s hands were truly clean.28

Meanwhile, those who criticized conditions in India but accepted

slavery at home could find themselves accused of inconsistency, or even

hypocrisy, by fellow Americans. When a writer for the proslavery Rich-

mond South expressed sympathy for the Indians during the rebellion, a

correspondent for the abolitionist National Era was nonplussed. ‘‘Are

the native Indians defrauded of their wages?’’ he asked. ‘‘Are they ill fed,

are they at the mercy of their Anglo Saxon lords? How is it with the

Genovese, Within the Plantation Household: Black and White Women of the OldSouth (Chapel Hill, NC, 1988), 265; Charles Huffnagle to William Marcy, Jan. 7,1857, Papers of the Consuls (National Archives, Washington, DC); G. Bhagat,Americans in India, 1784–1860 (New York, 1970), 111; Charles W. Frederick-son, ‘‘New York Cotton Market for the Month Ending August 21,’’ Hunt’s Mer-chants’ Magazine 37 (Sept. 1857), 335; J. N. Cardozo, ‘‘Supply and Consumptionof Cotton in 1858,’’ Hunt’s Merchants’ Magazine 38 (Apr. 1858), 514.

28. James Williams, Letters on Slavery from the Old World: Written during theCanvass for the Presidency of the United States in 1860 (Nashville, TN, 1861),152, 154, italics in original; Cox, Eight Years in Congress, 126; DAB, 20: 267.


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negro slaves in and around Richmond?’’ To this critic, slavery was at

least as bad as empire, and those who sidestepped criticizing slavery

could appear to be hypocrites.29

But consistency was rare, largely because those who made such analo-

gies did so to confirm previously held opinions, and the episodes they

invoked rarely moved them to take a hard look at their own beliefs.

Even those on the same side of the slavery issue created starkly different

analogies between American slavery and British India, depending on

considerations such as their audience and their attitudes toward empire.

Three American abolitionists, for example, had three very different takes

on the war in India, and their perspectives indicate the complexities of

drawing analogies. William Lloyd Garrison switched from a pro- to an

anti-British stance during the conflict. The Liberator had been in a pro-

British mood in the summer of 1857, as it celebrated the August 1 anni-

versary of emancipation in the British Empire, and early in the uprising,

Garrison did not question British accounts of the suppression. Quoting

the London Post, the Liberator stated that the massacre ordered by Nana

Sahib made blood burn ‘‘with the hottest desire for vengeance that ever

a nation felt.’’ By October 1857, however, Garrison and his colleagues

had changed their minds. Although most American newspapers de-

scribed sympathetically London’s mourning day for British casualties,

the Liberator insisted that it was ‘‘little short of blasphemy for a people

to subjugate nations, rob them, apply physical tortures, and goad them

to insurrection, and then go over the solemn farce of Fast days and

prayers.’’ Garrison maintained his anti-British stance for the duration of

the war and quoted frequently from Irish newspapers, a rich source of

anti-British diatribe. Noting the British cry for ‘‘Blood! Blood! Blood!,’’

the Liberator reprinted an Irishman’s poetic opinion that that was ‘‘a

horrible cry in a Christian land! / Where they boast that the Bible’s in

every one’s hand.’’ The Liberator had long maintained both a global

perspective and a focus on India. The slogan on its masthead was ‘‘Our

Country Is The World—Our Countrymen Are All Mankind,’’ so Garri-

son may well have considered supporting the natives in India in 1857 as

consistent in his advocacy.30

29. ‘‘Sympathy for the Sepoys,’’ National Era, July 30, 1857.30. ‘‘Horrors of the War in India,’’ Liberator, Sept. 25, 1857; ‘‘The War in

British India,’’ Liberator, Oct. 2, 1857; ‘‘Fasting and Prayer,’’ Liberator, Oct. 23,1857.


Frederick Douglass, meanwhile, counted revolutionary insurrection-

ists Joseph Cinque, Nat Turner, and Madison Washington among his

heroes, and he held Toussaint L’Ouverture in particularly high esteem.

In January 1860, he described Toussaint to an English audience as ‘‘the

noble liberator and law giver of his brave and dauntless people.’’ As with

Toussaint’s Haitian revolution in the 1790s, the Indian Uprising inspired

fear of slave revolts for its generation of white American southerners. But

Douglass denied any similarity between the uprising and a slave rebel-

lion. Instead, he used the events to contrast Indian violence with Ameri-

cans’ peaceful pursuit of abolitionism and to criticize antiblack prejudice,

a more common ill than proslavery sentiment. In a speech at the City

Hall in Glasgow, Scotland, the same month that he praised Toussaint,

Douglass curiously asserted that John Brown’s plan in occupying Har-

pers Ferry ‘‘was not to shed blood or destroy property, as the insurrec-

tionists in India had done,’’ but simply, and peacefully, to help slaves to

escape. Douglass contrasted the situations in India and America to

achieve the desired effect with his audience.31

Douglass resented the fact that the American public praised white

abolitionists while their attitude toward their black counterparts was

disinterested if not hostile. He also opposed the ‘‘class of abolition-

ists’’—whom he termed ‘‘Garrisonians,’’ after William Lloyd Garrison—

who took pride in their ‘‘Anglo-Saxon blood, as flippantly as those who

profess to believe in the natural inferiority of races.’’ He used the image

of India’s military—a few white officers governing a large number of

nonwhite sepoys—to describe the subordination of black abolitionists

to white abolitionists. ‘‘We may fight,’’ he told a New York audience in

August 1857, ‘‘but we must fight like the Seapoys of India, under white

officers.’’ Douglass’s complaint carried a clear threat to his white listen-

ers, because the bloody saga of the sepoys’ uprising against their white

rulers was then front-page news in America. Against the stories of car-

nage and chaos and with the implied threat of a violent uprising of

African American abolitionists, his words must have worried ‘‘Garrison-

ians.’’32

31. Quoted in Waldo E. Martin, Jr., The Mind of Frederick Douglass (ChapelHill, NC, 1984), 271; Frederick Douglass Papers, ed. John W. Blassingame, SeriesOne (5 vols., New Haven, CT, 1979–1992), 3: 297.

32. Martin, Mind of Frederick Douglass, 271; Douglass Papers, 3: 618, 203.


Poet and abolitionist John Greenleaf Whittier, despite his strong and

sincere interest in Indian culture, supported empire and praised the

Scottish troops who relieved their European brethren in the Lucknow

garrison in his poem, ‘‘The Pipes of Lucknow.’’ Using a widely reprinted

letter written by a physician who was rescued at Lucknow, Whittier

described the Scots’ arrival as

A burst of wild thanksgiving

Mingled woman’s voice and man’s;

‘‘God be praised!—the march of Havelock!

The piping of the clans’’ . . .

Round the silver domes of Lucknow,

Moslem mosque and Pagan shrine,

Breathed the air to Britons dearest,

The air of Auld Lang Syne.

The poem appeared in the National Era, an abolitionist paper for which

Whittier was corresponding editor. Its publication there shows that one

could simultaneously support empire and oppose slavery. A NationalEra column from July 1857 enunciated this stance clearly. ‘‘Unlike Slav-

ery in this country,’’ the columnist explained, ‘‘English rule in India

gradually enlightens and improves the condition of the subject race’’ so

that someday a ‘‘partially Anglicised’’ India could become independent

of ‘‘the country which gave her civilization and its benefits.’’ Some aboli-

tionists, therefore, abhorred slavery while asserting the need for non-

white peoples to remain under European tutelage until they had

absorbed enough ‘‘Anglicization’’ and ‘‘civilization’’ to be independent.33

Abolitionist views on empire differed, therefore, while the lessons that

Americans derived from these episodes could be polar opposites. Writ-

ers for the National Era believed that empire, unlike slavery, lifted up

those under its sway but rejected the Richmond South’s proslavery, anti-

empire stance. Yet James Williams believed that it was slavery, not em-

pire, that provided uplift, and he scorned British abolitionists who fo-

cused on ‘‘the work of emancipation in America,’’ asking in 1860, ‘‘by

33. John Greenleaf Whittier’s Poetry: An Appraisal and a Selection, ed. RobertPenn Warren (Minneapolis, MN, 1971), 140–42; ‘‘The Rebellion in India,’’ Na-tional Era, July 23, 1857; ‘‘The Relief of Lucknow,’’ Liberator, Jan. 22, 1858;Dion Boucicault, Plays, ed. Peter Thomson (Cambridge, UK, 1984), 220–21.


what right does England hold India in subjection?’’ Whereas ‘‘she found

the inhabitants in the enjoyment of a great degree of civilization . . . she

has reduced them to barbarism; the African slave,’’ by contrast, ‘‘has

been elevated from the most brutal barbarism to civilization.’’ On the

other hand, the Reverend W. W. Lyle, a Union chaplain during the Civil

War, insisted that the Confederacy surpassed the sepoys’ crimes. ‘‘When

the atrocities perpetrated during the Sepoy rebellion in India were made

known,’’ he recalled, ‘‘all Christendom stood aghast’’ and believed that

such ‘‘wholesale butchery and fiendish cruelty’’ could not recur. ‘‘But,

horrible as the cruelties perpetrated by the frenzied Sepoys were,’’ he

insisted ‘‘they have been completely eclipsed a thousand times by the

conduct of the rebels since they began their causeless and wicked rebel-

lion.’’ So empire could be better than slavery, slavery could be better

than empire, and a sepoy could represent either a slave or the white

southerner who owned him. Because of this malleability, it is small won-

der that Indian events moved Americans to confirm rather than recon-

sider their beliefs.34

While Frederick Douglass maintained that the sepoys’ violence was

far different from John Brown’s wish for a peaceful emancipation of

slaves, others developed different analogies between Brown and the In-

dian rebels. Some asserted Brown’s willingness to use violence. Southern

diarist Mary Chesnut saw Brown and the rebels as identical, insisting

that ‘‘the Sepoys only did what they laud and magnify John Brown for

trying to get the negroes to do here.’’ But George Noyes—a professor of

Oriental languages at Harvard College—compared Brown not with se-

poys but with an unfortunate group of British soldiers in India who

mistakenly advanced when they were supposed to retreat ‘‘and were

killed to the last man.’’ He saw them as worthy of praise, despite their

failure. ‘‘Like these brave Englishmen,’’ Noyes posited,

John Brown, who felt himself called of God and enlisted for life in the great cause

of freedom, evidently in this case misunderstood his orders. Like them, also, he

exhorted even from his foes the tribute of their hearty admiration, and went to his

grave decorated with the red cord of valor which makes his name immortal.

34. Williams, Letters on Slavery, 151–52; Rev. W. W. Lyle, A.M., Lights andShadows of Army Life; or, Pen Pictures from the Battlefield, the Camp, and theHospital (3rd ed., Cincinnati, OH, 1865), 372.


A foreign event could provide new insight to those who read about it, but

more often it served as a mirror—perhaps, more accurately, a Rorschach

test—revealing the observers’ views and often challenging them to ma-

nipulate the information to reinforce their beliefs. Domestic beliefs and

issues profoundly affected attitudes toward foreign events.35

Some Americans, rather than using Indian events just to express their

opinions about slavery, saw in the rebellion lessons for domestic policy.

The rebellion, although perhaps not perfectly analogous, did give cre-

dence to beliefs about affairs at home. James Holcombe, a professor of

law at the University of Virginia, used the Indians’ violence to warn of

the chaos that would follow the end of slavery. ‘‘Are the relations

of England to India, so anomalous,’’ he asked in November 1858, ‘‘that

it would be unsafe to accept generalizations drawn from the experience

of other communities?’’

Are the Hindoos unfit for liberty? Not more so than the African. Is despotism

necessary in India, because it is problematical whether [order could be maintained]

under more liberal institutions? The danger of license and anarchy would be far

more imminent, from an emancipation of our slaves.

However stringent conditions were in India, Holcombe suggested, con-

ditions in the South must be more so. Like Holcombe, John Townsend

took his cue from India and predicted that whites and African Americans

could never live as equals and that whites would always maintain control,

even if they were outnumbered. In Townsend’s scenario, presented in

1860 in The Doom of Slavery in the Union, freedmen in America would

ultimately be ‘‘either exterminated, or driven out of the country.’’ He

believed that ‘‘The late insurrection in British India’’ proved ‘‘that an

inferior and superior race cannot live together in the same country on

terms of equality’’ and that ‘‘although the inferior race was, perhaps, fifty

times more numerous,’’ they would be ‘‘in due time completely subdued

by the superior intelligence and courage of the white man. And such will

be the doom of the negros of the South, in any war with the whites.’’

For Townsend, Indian lessons could be directly applied to American

35. Mary Chesnut’s Civil War, ed. C. Vann Woodward (New Haven, CT,1981), 440; George F. Noyes, The Bivouac and the Battle-field; or, CampaignSketches in Virginia and Maryland (New York, 1863), 253–54; DAB, 13: 487.


situations. Northerners also used the Indian Uprising to reinforce policy

suggestions. In 1862, New Englander E. L. Pierce was supervising freed-

men raising cotton in Port Royal, South Carolina, and in his report enti-

tled The Negroes at Port Royal, he used the example of India to object

to plans to lease the land and the freedmen’s labor. Such an arrangement,

he insisted, would be as exploitative as slavery. ‘‘Let the history of British

East India, and of all communities where a superior race has attempted

to build up speedy fortunes on the labor of an inferior race occupying

another region, be remembered,’’ he pleaded, ‘‘and no just man will

listen to the proposition of leasing.’’ Like slavery’s advocates, Pierce used

Indian events to promote domestic policy.36�As Pierce’s assertion indicates, the violence of the Indian Uprising reso-

nated in the United States for years. Such resonance suggests that sig-

nificant global connections could exist between lands in the absence of

commensurate connections along lines of immigration or trade. The re-

bellion was engrained in American minds, and the colonial war’s negligi-

ble impact on the United States in terms of lives or treasure makes this

fixation all the more striking. Even the Civil War could not efface the

Indian rebellion from American consciousness. In July 1862, Mary

Chesnut finished reading Edward Money’s The Wife and the Ward,which was set at the siege of Kanpur, and mused, ‘‘Who knows what

similar horrors may lie in wait for us!’’ She recalled a play she had seen

about the Indian rebellion in Washington, DC, and the ‘‘thrill of terror’’

she had felt as the Indians ‘‘jump[ed] over the parapets.’’ They reminded

her of slaves—‘‘These faces were like so many of the same sort at

home’’—and she wondered how much longer slaves would ‘‘resist the

seductive and irresistable call ‘only rise, kill, and be free’?’’37

The nation was divided, but unionists and confederates shared memo-

ries of the Indian rebellion and played on Britons’ recollections of it to

36. James P. Holcombe, ‘‘Is Slavery Consistent with Natural Laws?’’ SouthernLiterary Messenger 27 (Dec. 1858), 405; John Townsend, The Doom of Slaveryin the Union: Its Safety Out Of It (2nd ed., Charleston, SC, 1860), 24, italics inoriginal; E. L. Pierce, The Negroes at Port Royal. Report of E.L. Pierce, Govern-ment Agent, to the Hon. Salmon P. Chase, Secretary of the Treasury (Boston,1862), 25; DAB, 9: 134, 14: 575–76.

37. Mary Chesnut’s Civil War, 409.


Figure 3: Dion Boucicault as Nana Sahib, the antagonist in his play about therebellion, Jessie Brown; or, The Relief of Lucknow. This popular drama waslikely the one that terrified Mary Chesnut, due to the uprising’s resemblanceto a slave rebellion. American hatred of Nana Sahib was so acute that no otheractor dared to take the role. (Daily National Intelligencer [Washington, DC],Jan. 1, 1859; Richard Fawkes, Dion Boucicault [London, 1979], 98, 99).Image courtesy of Special Collections, Templeman Library, University ofKent, Canterbury.


encourage British support for their sides. Traveling in America during

the war, Englishman Anthony Trollope encountered a Bostonian who

was outraged that Great Britain had declared neutrality in the conflict.

‘‘ ‘What would you in England have thought,’ ’’ the New Englander

asked, ‘‘ ‘if, when you were in trouble in India, we had openly declared

that we regarded your opponents there are [sic] as belligerents on equal

terms with yourselves?’ ’’ To Trollope, the apparent inconsistency was

defendable. He maintained that the analogy ‘‘would have been fairer had

it referred to any sympathy shown by us to insurgent negroes.’’ He

added,

had the army which mutinied in India been in possession of ports and sea-board;

had they held in their hands vast commercial cities and great agricultural districts;

had they owned ships and been masters of a wide-spread trade, America could have

done nothing better toward us than have remained neutral in such a conflict and

have regarded the parties as belligerents.

The Southern appeal, meanwhile, was more visceral. A writer for the

Confederate Index played on British fears of ‘‘another Cawnpore

[Kanpur]’’ to encourage British support for the American South. The

journal’s staff knew that the massacre remained vivid in British minds

and surmised that the British would see empire and slavery as sufficiently

analogous that the Indian rebellion could augur similar American vio-

lence. These enduring notions of the rebellion and its connection to

slavery evince its power and potential to influence policy.38

British India provided potential analogies for Americans who debated

slavery and filibustering, but their interest in the colony also derived

from their awe at its scope. This admiration was perhaps never more

evident than in the eulogies they offered in 1858, when control of the

colony moved from the Company to the Crown. In remarking on the

transition, a writer for Graham’s Illustrated Magazine of Philadelphia,

insisted that ‘‘No romance could be conceived more full of exciting inter-

est than the simple narrative of the progress of the East India Company,’’

and Godey’s Lady’s Book deemed Britain’s empire in India ‘‘glorious.’’

38. Anthony Trollope, North America (2 vols., Philadelphia, 1862), 1: 15;Douglas A. Lorimer, Colour, Class and the Victorians: English Attitudes to theNegro in the Mid-nineteenth Century (Leicester, UK, 1978), 165.


Even when such sentiment was tempered, the esteem was evident.

Knickerbocker writers admitted that it was probably a ‘‘blessing for the

race whose fate it so long held in its hands,’’ that the Company was

leaving, yet they deemed its work in India ‘‘a grand monument of middle-

class energy and enterprise.’’ Such appreciation could even eclipse rec-

ognition of the East India Company’s failures.39

And while Americans used British India to bolster their arguments

regarding filibustering or slavery, they also used it as a harbinger of their

own nation’s future expansion. Even as the Company’s power waned,

some Americans wanted their nation to emulate its achievements. In No-

vember 1858, a Christian Examiner writer referred to Mexico as ‘‘the

Hindostan of our Western hemisphere.’’ That same month, a writer for

Hunt’s Merchants’ Magazine suggested that ‘‘One small island in the

seas, or one small colony abroad, would create more trade and business

than fifty times the same extent at home.’’ South America, he believed,

should become ‘‘an East Indies to the United States.’’ In part, the timing

suggests their optimism and their perceptions of themselves as the Bri-

tons’ successors. Even as Americans saw the East India Company end,

they regarded it as a model and believed that they could learn from

British mistakes and create a superior version of such control in the

Western Hemisphere. The saga of British India inspired many analogies

to American readers. It could bolster the arguments of both abolitionists

and slaveholders, and it could present filibustering as a common if not

universal practice. It could also inspire larger plans than anything the

filibusters had ever attempted.40

39. ‘‘New Museum at the India House,’’ 358; ‘‘Literary Notices,’’ Godey’sLady’s Book 57 (Nov. 1858), 469; ‘‘The Death of a Great Power,’’ Knickerbocker,615, 617.

40. ‘‘Review of Current Literature,’’ Christian Examiner 65 (Nov. 1858), 456;‘‘An East Indies to the United States,’’ Hunt’s Merchants’ Magazine 39 (Nov.1858), 569, 571, italics in original.

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