Long lived in England, a place which was changing, for more than forty years until his death in 1813. He actively campaigned against black and white abolitionists and for the continuation of the slave trade. Despite making many additions and corrections, he never completed a second edition of the History. He had endeavoured to clinch his argument as to the essential inequality of white and black with a demolition of the free black Jamaican, Francis Williams. Educated in England, Williams was a poet and mathematician, and had established a school for black boys in Spanish Town. He had been cited by Hume in 1753 as providing an example of how ‘Negroes’ could never do more than mimic white Europeans. Williams represented for Long the terrifying spectre of African claims for equality: he claimed legal rights, could write Latin poetry, possessed a library of Enlightenment scholarship, taught his pupils Newtonian principles and dressed like a gentleman. It was essential to undermine him, pouring scorn on all his pretensions. But in so doing, Long demonstrated how his own privileged whiteness rested on sand. Only by denigrating blackness could he maintain his own sense of an entitled self; he needed that ‘otherness’ to know himself.

The Epilogue gives a brief overview of the main arguments and themes presented in the book, and explores the legacy of debates over British Emancipation within American political culture into the Civil War and Reconstruction. It also examines the unfinished business of the experiment in the British West Indies through the lens of conflicts between freedpeople and the colonial state decades after emancipation.

The chapter provides a transnational perspective on how the apprenticeship’s end caused new challenges for the free labor experiment, as British West Indian colonial economies faltered in the 1840s and former slaves asserted their rights as working people. In their pursuit of expanded liberty, black West Indians forced American antislavery to examine the limitations of a strict free labor ideology, and to envision the experiment’s success on other terms, as the issue of slavery moved to the center of national politics.

This chapter provides a study of commemorations of British Emancipation in the Atlantic world and their political meanings, exploring their transnational divergences and intersections in the cultural production of freedom. Starting with the Caribbean, it examines freedpeople’s celebrations of emancipation and how this at times conflicted with missionary and colonial elites’ directives on how freedom and slavery should be remembered and memorialized. In the United States, it traces the development of celebrations of August 1 and argues that these events arose out of attempts to shape public perceptions on the success of the experiment. August 1 enabled abolitionists and African Americans to publicly merge political and intellectual thoughts with the transnational triumph of British Emancipation toward an antislavery strategy at home.

This chapter examines how free labor was adapted as a compelling argument in the antislavery Anglo-Atlantic. For English antislavery these strategies developed out of a need to show emancipation’s imperial commercial advantages, as parliamentary debates questioned whether former slaves would work upon emancipation. In the United States, free labor antislavery emerged from a burgeoning ideology that imbued labor with moral characteristics. Through the industriousness of black West Indians, abolitionists on either side of the Atlantic hoped to prove the moral rightness of emancipation, the capability of former slaves within democratic capitalism, and the benefits of free labor.

This chapter examines free African Americans’ perceptions of the emancipated British West Indies. As I argue, beyond many of the concerns of their white abolitionist allies, free African Americans considered the experiment’s implications for their own future prospects of liberty, racial equality, and citizenship rights in the United States. In their autonomous newspapers, speeches, and print publications, they touted the success of the emancipated British West Indies as evidence against notions of black inferiority and as a model for participatory citizenship. But this narrative was complicated by a short-lived but provocative West Indian Emigration Scheme of the late 1830s, stimulating heated debates in the black press that reveal the limits of transnational identity.

The chapter traces the project of reforming the Anglo-West Indies from early missionary efforts through the post-emancipation. Abolitionists’ assessments of moral reform in the British colonies served as a compelling argument of the experiment’s success. In the United States, influenced by the Great Awakening, morality, religious instruction, education, and spiritual uplift were appealing indicators on the success or failure of emancipation. Some American reformers journeyed to the West Indies to take part in this “civilizing mission.” But as I argue, freedpeople had their own perceptions of moral behavior, challenging the expectations of reformers in both England and America.

The chapter provides a study of how the apprenticeship implemented through much of the emancipated British West Indies posed problems for the free labor defense of the experiment, as it sought to maintain the structures of slavery — in deed if not in name. None understood this better than former slaves, who viewed the repression doled out by magistrates and planters as a subversion of both labor and freedom. Through testimonies and acts of resistance, I illustrate how freedpeople forced an end to the apprenticeship even as American abolitionists sought to use their laboring potential as a defense of the experiment.

This chapter challenges competing accounts of the privileges or immunities clause propounded by other scholars such as Kurt Lash, Michael Kent Curtis, Akhil Amar, and Randy Barnett. It argues that the privileges or immunities clause likely does not incorporate the Bill of Rights nor does it guarantee unenumerated fundamental rights. It argues that the privileges or immunities clause was instead an antidiscrimination provision with respect to state-defined civil rights.

This chapter surveys the legal history of the term "due process of law," from Magna Carta, the Statutes of Edward III, and the Petition of Right to the writings of William Blackstone and the opinions of antebellum state-level court cases. It argues that there was no concept of "substantive due process" in the antebellum period. It refutes arguments that due process prohibited class legislation, limited states to reasonable exercises of the police powers, or underwent a change in meaning as a result of abolitionist constitutional thinkers.

This chapter surveys the historical, political, and legal problems confronting the framers of the Fourteenth Amendment. It describes the antebellum debate over whether free blacks were "citizens of the United States" entitled to comity rights, the travails of abolitionists, the rampant private violence and mob rule and inadequate protection of the laws, and the abridgment of the civil rights of the newly freed people in the infamous Black Codes.