(C) U.S. State Dept This story was originally published by U.S. State Dept and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . Sarah Parker Remond: Citizen Diplomacy and the Emancipation Proclamation as Foreign Policy [1] [] Date: 2022-01-31 11:38:50-05:00 When Civil War erupted in April of 1861, President Abraham Lincoln and Secretary of State William Seward’s official reason for the war was to preserve the union of states, not abolish slavery. In the end, emancipation did in fact become a war objective. What changed? How did the Emancipation Proclamation affect European nations’ refusal to acknowledge the Confederacy as an independent nation? And how did a Black American citizen diplomat, Sarah Parker Remond, influence British textile workers to support the cause of abolition during the war? U.S. Citizen Diplomats Travel the World Calling for the End of Slavery The Lincoln administration was reluctant to tie the war objectives to emancipation. Even though the Republican party had taken an official stance against the spread of slavery, and several members of Lincoln’s cabinet and the U.S. Congress were active abolitionists, the threat of secession remained from the border states of Maryland, Missouri, Kentucky, and Tennessee. Even in the nation’s capital, Washington, D.C., the institution of slavery was legal. Secretary Seward, himself an abolitionist, worried that fighting for emancipation would cause European nations to recognize the Confederate States of America. However, American abolitionists had been speaking for several years to foreign audiences about the horrors the enslaved endured in the “slave states.” As citizen diplomats, Americans who engaged in activism were not speaking for the United States government. But, they encouraged their international audiences to lobby their own governments to put pressure on the United States. Their message resonated widely–especially with people who worked in British textile mills handling cotton that had been produced from enslaved labor. Sarah Parker Remond: Citizen Diplomat Sarah Parker Remond, a Black female abolitionist, spoke passionately to audiences throughout Great Britain about how they could advocate for abolition. Beginning in 1858, Remond traveled through Ireland, Scotland, and England. She largely directed her arguments to working-class women and girls. Remond appealed to their shared sense of womanhood and motherhood. She did not shy from being candid about how enslaved women were subjected to sexual assault and could have their children torn from them. “If English women and English wives knew the unspeakable horrors to which their sex were exposed on the southern plantation, they would freight every westward gale with the voice of their moral indignation, and demand for the Black woman the protection and rights enjoyed by the white.” – Sarah Parker Remond, 1859 Remond drew crowds in the thousands. In 1859, she suggested that the English textile workers’ labor was a symbol of support of American slavery. “When I walk through the streets of Manchester and meet load after load of cotton,” she told the mill workers, “I think of those 80,000 cotton plantations on which was grown the $125 million worth of cotton which supply your market, and I remember that not one cent of that money ever reached the hands of the laborers.” The Emancipation Proclamation: New Guidance for Diplomats on the Ground The effects of Remond and other American abolitionists’ advocacy were clear after Lincoln and Seward announced to the world the text of the Emancipation Proclamation. The Battle of Antietam in September of 1862 provided Lincoln with the military win that the United States needed to show global powers. This win showed the world that tying emancipation to the war goals of preserving the union of states was feasible. Seward sent out a dispatch to all U.S. diplomats instructing them to inform their foreign counterparts that “it is the Union, and not slavery, that must be maintained and preserved.” Further, he advised the diplomats to remind foreign government officials that the United States would remember which nations were “most just” and that the U.S. would not hesitate to take military action against those countries which chose “bondage over freedom.” Additionally, Lincoln and Seward had taken official action to demonstrate the clear delineation between the Confederacy’s determination to protect and expand enslavement with the United States’s moves to destroy it and expand citizenship for Black Americans. Black citizens were issued passports. The United States extended full diplomatic recognition of the Black republics Haiti and Liberia in 1862 and sent official U.S. envoys. The Administration ended slavery in the District of Columbia through compensated emancipation to enslavers. Finally, the United States negotiated the Seward-Lyons agreement with Great Britain, which sanctioned mutual search of ships of suspected slave traders sailing under U.S. and British flags. U.S. Citizens Thank British Textile Workers for Their Solidarity Against Slavery In England, where Remond had spoken with such passion, cotton textile workers were suffering extreme hardships. The United States’ blockade of southern ports limited Great Britain’s ability to import raw cotton. By 1862, around the time of the Emancipation Proclamation, sixty percent of Lancashire mills had shut down, leaving scores of workers without pay. As the British government debated whether or not to recognize the Confederacy in the face of these severe financial losses in the “cotton famine,” the mill workers held firm in their conviction they would not choose slavery over profit. As a result of their solidarity against enslavement in the Confederacy, cotton textile mill workers found themselves unemployed and facing starvation. In early February 1863, and with Lincoln’s approval, grateful citizens of New York and Philadelphia sent a relief cargo of bacon, bread, rice, corn, and 15,000 barrels of flour on the George Griswold to 4,000 citizens of Liverpool to thank them for their principled allyship. By 1863, after the Emancipation Proclamation went into effect, Confederate hopes of British recognition were dashed. American abolitionists like Sarah Parker Remond had paved the way for public resistance to an alliance with the Confederacy’s existence predicated upon enslavement, nor would mill workers submit to the demands of mill owners. Additionally, the U.S. Minister to Great Britain, Charles Francis Adams, continued to tell the British government that any recognition of the Confederacy, aid, or intervention would be seen as blocking the United States’ intent to forever abolish slavery. As a result of political and public pressure, the British government continued to maintain neutrality. The Impact of the Emancipation Proclamation in France [END] --- [1] Url: https://diplomacy.state.gov/u-s-diplomacy-stories/sarah-parker-remond-citizen-diplomacy-and-the-emancipation-proclamation-as-foreign-policy/ Published and (C) by U.S. State Dept Content appears here under this condition or license: Public Domain. via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds: gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/usstate/