In the early 1830s, the U.S. anti-slavery movement was undergoing a profound radicalization as white anti-slavery proponents like William Lloyd Garrison joined black activists to demand the immediate, uncompensated emancipation of all slaves. This chapter illuminates the influence that two international free-soil havens had on the anti-slavery movement during this decade: Canada and Mexico. Following in the footsteps of newspaper editor Benjamin Lundy, it brings to life the critical debates that unfolded in the anti-slavery press about what meaningful freedom should look like for free African Americans and former slaves – and where they could go to find it.

In 1833, the British Parliament voted to abolish slavery in its overseas colonies, establishing a four-year “apprenticeship” system to gradually transition the slave-based agricultural system to a wage-based economy. This chapter focuses on American responses to British abolition. People on both sides of the slavery issue were keen to observe the outcome of freedom at the heart of Britain’s lucrative plantation economy, and both Americans and the British clamored to witness and record the unfolding of emancipation on the black-majority sugar islands. In the process, this chapter shows, anti-slavery advocates honed various forms of social investigation to prove and publicize their belief that emancipation could succeed in the sectionally divided United States.