In an 1826 letter, the German writer and journal editor Therese Huber (1764–1829) described to the famous French abolitionist and revolutionary Abbe Henri Gregoire (1751–1831) the crucial moment at which ‘the idea of the injustices which the black peoples [les peuples noirs] were suffering struck me for the first time’. Huber explained that in that instant ‘about eight years ago’ the practice of slavery had presented itself to her in the form of a medallion made of terracotta which showed a black slave chained and on his knees pleading to a white man who was holding a whip. While such material objects with anti-slavery images were popular and powerful weapons used by the abolitionist movement in Great Britain, they seem to have rarely made their way into the German principalities. The image in question had made a lasting impression on Huber; she declared solemnly: ‘[M]y opinion took shape and ever since then the negroes are become my brothers.’ Her correspondence with Gregoire from the 1820s reveals that Huber indeed tried to employ her position as chief editor of the Morgenblatt für gebildete Stände, one of the most widely read German literary journals, to spread anti-slavery sentiment in the German-speaking territories. It also discloses that she used her personal network to support the movement to end slavery and the slave trade.

Huber's attitude is not reflected in international research on the abolitionist movement in Europe around 1800, in which German activists are rarely mentioned. Rather, most historians have taken the absence of an institutionalised abolitionist movement from the German-speaking realm as evidence of the absence of German activists from the international movement. Huber’s correspondence with Gregoire – which has only recently been rediscovered in a private archive near Paris – challenges this assumption. This case study shows that an analysis which centres around concrete individuals, networks and micro-historical processes of exchange adds another layer to our understanding of the transnational abolitionist movement. It shows that abolitionist discourse was not restricted to countries which owned colonies in the Caribbean, nor was activist action. The case of Therese Huber's endeavours is interesting on two levels: first, for her role as a female activist, and second, for the fact that she operated at the margins of the Atlantic world, helping to extend the discourse on the Atlantic slave system to Central Europe.