Edward B. Rugemer, in The Problem of Emancipation: The Caribbean Roots of the American Civil War, argues that the American Civil War is an Atlantic story, not simply a North American one. Using a transnational approach, the author shows that ideas and movements from abroad easily influenced the young United States, including examples of abolitionism from Haiti and Britain’s Slavery Abolition Act. Rugemer engages earlier scholarship that linked the Caribbean experience to that of pre-Civil War America: Alfred Hunt’s work, Haiti’s Influence on Antebellum America (1988), connects the Haitian Revolution and abolitionism to the same in the young American republic. Rugemer’s account is much more detailed, taking Hunt’s previous work and broadening its scope.
As presented in the title, the “problem of emancipation” for Rugemer was the competing economic interests of American slaveholders with the liberal ideas of equality as expressed in the republic’s founding. Britain’s rhetoric of emancipation in the 1830s is of particular importance for Rugemer, for it is here that he places the beginning of disunion in the United States over the issue of slavery. The idea that the origin of the split of antebellum America began largely with the importation of British anti-slavery ideology is a major break from previous scholarship that places disunion much later in the nineteenth century. Further, situating the discussion in the larger Atlantic framework (to include abolitionism in the Caribbean) helps solidify his claims. Rugemer wants to build upon other historical works that chronicle the transmission of ideology across the Atlantic world, such as Richard Blackett’s Building an Anti-slavery Wall (1983). Where Rugemer differs from this work is his use of transnational anti-slavery movements as an analytical framework for understanding the build up to the Civil War (but he does not go into a detailed examination of the Civil War itself). Interestingly, Rugemer is somewhat ideologically deterministic, for he places great power in ideas; the Civil War seems inevitable, given the ideas about slavery that were spreading. “For twenty-seven years American abolitionists had advocated the peaceful path, but the rest of the country had not listened, and now the war had come.” (p. 290) The polemic nature of anti-slavery ideology served to deepened the rift between the North and South.
The Problem of Emancipation fits into many different historiographies—the American South, Caribbean slavery, Atlantic abolitionism, etc.—and its transnational approach gives it greater versatility. Historians of all parts of the Atlantic world will find this work useful and informative.