Changes

The most surprising discovery was the close relationship between Victorian free trade ideology and transatlantic abolitionism. This led me to answering a question I hadn’t thought to ask: What happened to US abolitionists once American slavery was abolished?

Nowadays, historians and political scientists tend to associate American free trade ideology with Jeffersonianism, which became tied to a defense of Southern slavery by the time of the American Civil War. However, what I’ve found is that a number of America’s leading abolitionists—among them, William Lloyd Garrison, Henry Ward Beecher, Joshua Leavitt, Ralph Waldo Emerson—were subscribers to a very different strand of free trade ideology: the Victorian ideology then famously known as Cobdenism, named after Victorian England’s apostle of free trade, Richard Cobden. He and his transatlantic disciples believed that free trade and non-interventionism in foreign affairs would lead to domestic prosperity and world peace.