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Veiled Visions: The 1906 Atlanta Race Riot and the Reshaping of American Race Relations (review)

they embraced. The British knew themselves to be free, and yet they stood in constant fear of a loss of liberties and rights, an impulse that led British workers to sympathize “with slaves who had none.” (221) Bury the Chains, moreover, is the first account of the British antislavery movement to assign the Haitian Revolution the importance it deserves. The slave uprising in Saint Domingue, and the consequent annihilation of colonial wealth, power and lives, ruined the prospects for the antislavery movement in England for more than a decade. At the same time, though, in Hochschild’s telling, the Haitian Revolution also effected a permanent change in how the British thought about overseas slaving. Veterans of the disastrous and wasteful five-year campaign to suppress the slave rebellion returned to England convinced that the slave trade did more harm than good, that the importation of African captives produced inherently unstable societies. Those reports and those experiences, Hochschild proposes, figured importantly in the impulse to abolish the slave trade in 1807. Years later, in a similar way, the memory of Saint Domingue led even the most moderate reformers to argue in the early 1830s, in the midst of slave unrest in Jamaica, that if Parliament did not abolish slavery soon than the enslaved would do it for them. The most stunning departure, though, lies in what Hochschild elects to avoid. This is the first history of British antislavery to refuse even a passing nod to the writings of Eric Williams, whose Capitalism and Slavery has served as a touchstone for academic work on this subject since 1944. This is a choice and not an oversight. Hochschild knows the literature thoroughly. Nor does this necessarily indicate contempt for what Williams wrote, since Bury the Chains absorbs and endorses some of his more important suggestions, on the importance of slave revolts most notably. This silence on the “antislavery debate” serves instead as a declaration of independence from the questions that have agitated scholars for more than two generations. Hochschild is less interested in how we might judge the abolitionists than in what we might learn from them. In their commitment to righting the most intractable wrongs, there is a model to emulate, even as we acknowledge the limits of their vision. What Bury the Chains lacks in theoretical sophistication it makes up for in its enthusiasm for a dedication to social justice.