Katherine Gregory | Wake Forest University
On May 20, 1846, Jane Smeal, Eliza Wigham, and Frederick Douglass ascended the hills of Arthur’s Seat to carve the slogan ‘Send Back the Money!’ into this Edinburgh monument. Smeal and Wigham, two leaders of the Edinburgh Ladies' Emancipation Society, accompanied Douglass on his journey to protest the Free Church of Scotland’s continued financial investment in American slavery. Douglass’ Scottish protests were chronicled prolifically in the Scottish press. The Fife Herald reported on May 21, 1846, ‘Mr. Frederick Douglass… immediately hied, spade in hand, accompanied by two ladies belonging to the society of Friends… and began to carve this vulgar cry in graceful characters upon the great sward.’ Smeal and Wigham were anonymised in this narrative, their identities erased.
Black abolitionists, however, were dependent on the hospitality and financial support of the Ladies’ Antislavery Society Scottish when visiting Edinburgh. The Edinburgh Ladies' Emancipation Society supported and sustained Black activists’ work and travel, enabling their movement through the globe in a century marked by extreme violence and surveillance over Black bodies. In Edinburgh, these activists found acceptance and deepened their political work, and the Ladies’ Society was integral to both supporting this work and creating spaces for white women activists to vocally engage in the ‘slavery question.’ Women’s abolitionist organisations offered participants a place to carve out unprecedented public roles through their participation in antislavery societies, boldly challenging Victorian restrictions on women's political engagement. The Ladies’ Emancipation Society also welcomed and supported Black women activists visiting Scotland. These women’s stories are especially important to tell; their travels through Scotland and public speaking tours demonstrate the agency, power, and presence of women of colour in nineteenth-century politics. While white women’s antislavery groups have been rightly criticised for their reliance on sentimentalist rhetoric – appealing to their readers’ sense of Christian charity or pity – the Edinburgh Ladies’ Abolitionist Society opened vital spaces for Black American abolitionists to speak directly to British audiences, without filtering their words through white-operated antislavery publications.
Slavery had been abolished in the UK by 1834, yet Scots still protested for the dissolution of unfree labour practices across the globe. The British government outlawed the slave trade in 1807, and the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833 forbade the practice of buying, selling, or owning enslaved persons in the United Kingdom or its territories. However, abolition in the colonies was slower, with enslaved peoples being placed on a gradual emancipation plan. Scottish women were vital in petitioning to end the apprenticeship scheme enacted in the West Indies, which was chattel slavery by another name. In 1833, 162,000 Edinburgh women signed a petition supporting the dissolution of unfree labour practices across all British territories. By April 1838, antislavery societies across Scotland had sent over 370 petitions to Parliament condemning Parliament’s ongoing practice of apprenticeships. By 1840, the final ‘apprenticeships’ and forced servitude contracts in the colonies were disbanded, in large part due to the hundreds of petitions women’s antislavery societies submitted to Parliament.
Jane Smeal described women’s involvement in antislavery protests in an 1836 letter to English abolitionist Elisabeth Pease: ‘The females in this city who have much leisure for philanthropic objects are I believe very numerous – but unhappily that is not the class who take an active part in the cause here – neither the noble, the rich, nor the learned are to be found advocating our cause. Our subscribers and most efficient members are all in the middling and working classes but they have great zeal and labour very harmoniously together.’ Surprisingly, the most active and vocal participants in the movement were not upper-class women with ‘much leisure for philanthropic objects’. The Scottish women’s abolitionist movement was led by common people, many of whom had to work outside the home, and not by wealthy women. This is a major break with American women abolitionists, most of whom were born to wealthy families and could speak out because of their connections to influential political and social circles. Women abolitionists, however, were continuously excluded from participating in public forums. At the World’s Anti-Slavery Convention in London in 1840, the ‘Woman Question’ was up for debate, and female abolitionists from Scotland and America were initially refused entry to the convention. After several days of debate, select women were permitted to view the proceedings from the upper gallery, but not allowed to speak publicly at the event.
One of the most famous speakers on the Edinburgh antislavery circuit was Ellen Craft, who escaped slavery with her husband William in 1848. Ellen, who was extremely light-skinned, posed as an infirm white man traveling with his enslaved butler, William, and the pair traveled north on first-class trains and steamboats. They arrived in Philadelphia on Christmas Day and later settled in Boston’s Beacon Hill neighbourhood. After the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act in 1850, however, Ellen and William emigrated to Britain to avoid kidnapping by slavecatchers. In Edinburgh, the Crafts stayed at Cannon’s Hotel in St. Andrew Square with William Wells Brown, another self-emancipated Black American on the U.K. abolitionist speaking tour. The Crafts published their memoir Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom in 1860, which initially credited William Craft as the sole author. This error was later corrected, but the omission of Ellen’s name demonstrates the insistent erasure of Black women’s voices from abolitionist narratives. While touring in America, Ellen was expected to stand silently onstage with her husband while he lectured, yet Ellen was able to speak about her experience publicly in Scotland.
Women’s societies were vital laboratories for women to express their independence, participate in key political discourses, and shape their identities as activists and orators. Though these activities – letter writing campaigns, for example – were less public than giving speeches in packed lecture halls, they organised and financed Black abolitionists’ tours, fundraised for their causes, sheltered and welcomed them, and affirmed their senses of belonging, community, and safety. One Glasgow-printed pamphlet titled ‘Right and Wrong Amongst the Abolitionists of the United States’ (1841) featured an introduction by Harriet Martineau, a British sociologist and political theorist. Martineau strongly criticises those white abolitionists who timidly supported the concept of gradual abolition and ‘guarded their original Constitution from innovation and circumscription.’ She recommends, by contrast, that British audiences stay vocal and radical in their work. She writes, ‘Not for a moment should the Slave-holder be permitted to fan his embers of hope; – not for a moment should the American Slave be compelled to tremble at the adversity of his earliest and staunchest friends, if we can, by any effort, obtain a hearing for the cause’. While men dominated public speaking forums, women created parallel associations where they developed sophisticated political strategies and organisational techniques, including writing hundreds of antislavery petitions to Parliament. These activists defied social conventions by speaking publicly, organising boycotts of slave-produced goods, and circulating petitions – activities that pushed far beyond acceptable ‘feminine’ behaviour.
Crossing the Atlantic on her antislavery speaking tour, Sarah Parker Remond gave a lecture at the Edinburgh Ladies’ Emancipation Society on October 5, 1860. Newspapers wrote that her talk was ‘crowded to the door by a most respectable audience, numbering upwards of 2,000’ and she lectured to a friendly crowd about ‘our abhorrence of the sin of Slavery.’ Like Ellen Craft, Remond’s personal history was filtered through male authors and gatekeepers. Matthew Davenport Hill, an English white lawyer and abolitionist, included her life story in his collection Our Exemplars, Poor and Rich; Remond’s was the only story from a Black woman in the anthology of ‘biographical sketches’. At the time of Remond’s lecture, the Edinburgh Ladies’ Emancipation Society was locked in an ideological debate with the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society (BFASS), which supported the gradual abolition of slavery in America. The Edinburgh Ladies’ group, led by Jane and Eliza Wigham, staunchly supported William Lloyd Garrison’s demand that enslaved Black Americans be emancipated immediately. The women’s group was much more radical than their English counterparts, and even John Wigham (Jane’s husband and Eliza’s father) and his Edinburgh Emancipation Society suggested that the Ladies take a more ‘measured’ approach to abolition. In protest, the Wigham women and Ladies’ Society declined to host BFASS speakers in Edinburgh.
The Edinburgh Ladies’ Emancipation Society printed hundreds of pamphlets that criticised the antithetical or contradictory beliefs of various Christian antislavery groups. An 1857 text republished a selection of George B. Cheever’s ‘God Against Slavery: and the freedom and duty of the pulpit to rebuke it, as a sin against God’. Another pamphlet (1858) printed Harriet Beecher Stowe’s brutal takedown of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, in which she outlined the violent history of Christian missions used to subjugate Black and Indigenous populations. These texts engage with complex political philosophy, the injustices of various Christian denominations, and encourages women to steel their hearts against poisonous influence from self-interested men, eager to line their own pockets and ignorant of the suffering of others. The Ladies’ Society reprinting of these texts demonstrates the extremely high level of literary sophistication among its members and readership; not content to simply support the work of public male abolitionists, these women were dedicated to educating themselves in the antislavery debate, so that they could participate through letter-writing campaigns. One Ladies’ Society pamphlet (1860) debated the efficacy of John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Fery, publishing letters between ‘Mrs. Mason’ and ‘Mrs. Child' in which the women publicly discussed the radical liberation theory underpinning this polarising uprising. Participating in the contentious and contemporary debate about radical and militant antislavery activism, Lydia Marie Child and the Mrs. Mason – a plantation owner’s wife in Virginia – leapt into the fray of a distinctly unfeminine discourse.
The story of the Edinburgh Ladies’ Abolition Society is but one of many similar tales of Scottish women activists in the nineteenth century. Between 1833 and 1868, sixteen Ladies’ Abolition Societies were established in Scotland. The National Library of Scotland has launched a research initiative – titled Our Bondage and Our Freedom – that includes an online map that allows viewers to see where important Black abolitionists in Edinburgh stayed and lectured, where Scottish activists campaigned and lectured, and where Ladies’ Societies hosted events. Still, the work of Edinburgh women abolitionists and the Black activists they supported has received little scholarly attention. The tide is gradually shifting, though, in part through artists’ projects. In 2019, British filmmaker Isaac Julien created an immersive video work titled Lessons of the Hour, which explores Frederick Douglass’ travels to Scotland in the 1840s. This work notably includes actors who play Smeal and Wigham, visualising their ‘Send Back the Money’! protest and support of Douglass’ monumental British campaign. Lessons of the Hour aims to correct the erasure of Black and white women from narratives of the abolitionist movement, including stories of Anna Murray Douglass, Frederick’s wife and collaborator, Ottilie Assing, a German suffragist and feminist who translated important Black political texts, and other women activists fill the frames of his film. While such initiatives help to recover legacies of these women’s contributions to the abolitionist movement, there are many stories yet untold about women and antislavery activism in Scotland.
Further Reading:
Celeste-Marie Bernier and Hannah-Rose Murray, Nineteenth-Century African American Narratives in Britain and Ireland (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2024)
William Craft and Ellen Craft, Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom: The Escape of William and Ellen Craft from Slavery (London: William Tweedie, 1860)
Alasdair Pettinger, Frederick Douglass and Scotland 1846: Living an Antislavery Life (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018)
Sirpa Salenius, “Transatlantic Interracial Sisterhoods: Sarah Remond, Ellen Craft, and Harriet Jacobs in England,” Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies vol. 38, no. 1 (2710): 166-196
Dr. Katherine Gregory is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Art History at Wake Forest University. Her research focuses on African American art and the Black diaspora in the nineteenth century.