GUEST POST: Mixed Souls: C19th Black American Freedom Fighters and their interracial marriages in Britain and Ireland

During their nineteenth century lecturing tours of Britain and Ireland, many Black American freedom fighters campaigned against US enslavement, global oppression and white supremacy and created new lives outside of the US, sometimes with white women. In this guest post for The Mixed Museum, Dr Hannah-Rose Murray, a historian based at the University of Suffolk and author of Advocates of Freedom, published by Cambridge University Press in 2020, explores some of their stories.

19th century freedom fighters (2)

Black Americans: fighting for freedom in the 19th century 

During a British antislavery meeting the early 1840s, Moses Roper – a radical and pioneering abolitionist, author, social justice campaigner and survivor of US enslavement – protested white supremacist ideologies that decreed people of African descent were naturally and biologically inferior. He pointed to his own racial heritage (African and Indigenous), and how his marriage to a white woman in England, whose father was Welsh, meant that his two daughters “thus had part of English, Welsh, American, negro, and Indian blood in their veins”. He demanded to know of white racial scientists in particular, “what proportion of a soul [they] would allow my girls to possess?” 

Incensed at the racism targeted towards himself, his family, and his oppressed brethren, Roper refused to let such violent and abhorrent theories go unchallenged. This was yet more urgent given the rise in popularity of these theories in Britain. Throughout the nineteenth-century, Black people of all ages struggled against racism in every aspect of their lives and their daily battles are yet further evidence that despite Britain's claim throughout the centuries – and even today – that the nation is one of freedom and tolerance, the reality was, and is, far different.

James Watkins urged the British to boycott rice made with the "blood and bones” of enslaved people

Black American freedom fighters like Roper had an immeasurable impact on the British cultural, social and geographical landscape. During the nineteenth century, an untold number of African American activists travelled to Britain and Ireland and orchestrated physically and mentally gruelling lecturing tours that covered every single county. They spoke in large industrial cities, mining and fishing villages on the coastline, as well as rural communities in the mountains of Wales, the Orkney Islands, and areas including what is now the Lake District. Black abolitionists spoke to, quite literally, millions of people – including royalty, the aristocracy, the middle and working classes and children’s groups – in multiple venues, from town halls, guildhalls and corn exchange buildings to churches, theatres, hotels, restaurants and parks and other open spaces.

Frederick Douglass, c.1879. Image Public domain.
Frederick Douglass, c.1879. Image Public domain.

In their lectures, Black activists composed and recited their own poetry, exhibited panoramas and paintings, sold copies of their autobiographies  – often outselling their famous Victorian contemporaries, at least in terms of initial sales – and collected donations to legally purchase family members still enslaved. They spoke about painful and traumatic memories of enslavement and championed Black heroism and freedom fighters who had resisted enslavement, often at the cost of their own lives. They targeted pillars of white supremacy (institutions, presidents, politicians) and the enslavers they had liberated themselves from. 

They also shamed British politicians, religious ministers and communities who supported US enslavement, and challenged the racism they experienced on British soil. Many powerfully protested Britain’s growing wealth and the nation’s responsibility in supporting and perpetuating US enslavement by importing cotton, sugar and rice into key ports. Black freedom fighter, abolitionist, editor, author and philosopher Frederick Douglass, for example, declared how the price of an enslaved person in Louisiana was always regulated by the price of a bale of cotton in Manchester, and James Watkins said to one audience they should boycott rice from Georgia as it was made with the “blood and bones” of enslaved people.

Ellen and William Craft
Ellen and William Craft

Several activists remained in Britain for a year or two, others remained longer: William Wells Brown travelled for five years, James Watkins resided in England for at least ten years, and Ellen and William Craft lived in London for nearly twenty years, where they raised five children. Other activists married white British women and returned to the US or Canada, or remained in Britain for the rest of their lives.

The abolitionist, actor and magician Henry ‘Box’ Brown famously escaped enslavement by posting himself in a box to Philadelphia 

Many historians including Jeffrey Green have done vital genealogical work in researching the lives and marriages of Black Americans on British soil (see Learn more below).

Some of these stories are well-known: William Gustavus Allen and his white wife Mary Elizabeth King (who feature in The Mixed Museum’s Mixed Race Irish in Britain, 1700-2000 exhibition) were forcibly driven out of the US on pain of death for their interracial marriage. Once in England, Allen orchestrated popular lecturing tours and, in 1853, published a book, The American Prejudice against Color, in Dublin, where the couple were then living with their children (Julia Maria, Harriet Aurilla, Richard Dowden, Mary Elizabeth, and Patrick Loguen). In the early 1860s the family moved to London, where two more children were born; both husband and wife worked as teachers. Tragically, the Allen family lost several of their children to tuberculosis. 

The Resurrection of Henry Box Brown at Philadelphia, a lithograph by Samuel Rowse published in 1850. Image: public domain.
The Resurrection of Henry Box Brown at Philadelphia, a lithograph by Samuel Rowse published in 1850. Image: public domain.

Henry ‘Box’ Brown, abolitionist, actor, magician, performer and survivor of US enslavement, spent nearly two decades in England after his infamous self-liberation from Richmond, Virginia, where he posted himself in a box to Philadelphia. In 1855, Brown married Jane Floyd in England and had three children, two surviving to adulthood (Annie and Edward). Jane Brown worked alongside her activist husband in numerous performances, sometimes leading panoramic shows herself. The family moved to Toronto, where Brown is buried.

Many Black abolitionists conducted lecturing tours to raise money to legally buy their family members from U.S. enslavement

An early pioneer in the antislavery movement was Nathaniel Paul. Paul was an abolitionist and preacher who worked in New York and with the Wilberforce Settlement in Canada. Paul travelled to Britain in 1832 on behalf of the Settlement and for three years raised donations from various parts of the country. By this point, his first wife Eliza Lamson Paul had died, and Paul married again in England to a white Englishwoman, Anne Adey. She was regarded as an “accomplished, intelligent, amiable and pious woman” and though she was warned about the racism and vitriol the couple would receive in the US as an interracial couple, “she calmly made up her mind to receive, in the spirit of her Saviour, whatever of reproach or obloquy might be cast upon her”.

Moses Roper followed Paul shortly afterwards. He travelled to England in 1835 and two years later published one of the first autobiographical narratives written by an African American author on British soil, Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Moses Roper, a work which was printed in the US in the following year. To raise money for his education, financial survival, and for the legal purchase of his family members, Roper embarked on an extensive lecturing tour of England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland, speaking in rural and far-flung communities. 

Moses Roper
Moses Roper

Despite the intense sabotage and racist slander he received from white newspaper correspondents, white British abolitionists and many white audiences alike, Roper constantly challenged British and transatlantic racism. When white audiences were shocked, discomfited and threatened by his painful recollections of the torture and racism he personally experienced and witnessed, he resolved to never be silent about his oppression and resolved to always “tell the truth”.

In 1839, Roper married a white Englishwoman named Ann Price, and the couple had five daughters, three surviving to adulthood: Maria, who tragically died as a child, Annie, Ada, Alice, and Maria, who also tragically died as a child. Roper and his family moved to Canada in 1844 but by the early 1860s their marriage seems to have broken down, for Ann Price and their children had moved back to England without him. Roper was married again in New York by the late 1860s, but he died alone in Boston in 1891.

As previously mentioned, in his lectures Roper campaigned against the growing popularity of scientific racism, an ideology that was rooted in white supremacy and the ‘innate’ and ‘natural’ inferiority of people of African descent. As early as 1839, Roper criticised the works of European racist scientists who promoted their ideas abroad and whose dangerous and violent theories were used by white racist enslavers who created ideologies of their own to maintain and perpetuate enslavement of Black people of all ages and genders.

Several freedom fighters found solace in Canada before moving to Britain

In defending equality and social justice, Roper enlisted the example of his own family: he powerfully wrote to one of the authors of these racist ideas, “telling him that I am partly Indian, partly African, and partly white, and that there are about a million persons of the same colour, being the descendants of planters by their slaves: I asked him, as a learned and religious man, for such he professes to be, if he thought I and all like me, of mixed race had only a half or a quarter of a soul [a] piece, for he must admit that we had some part of a soul, through the mixture of the blood.” But, Roper added, “he has never answered that letter”.

Several Black freedom fighters found brief solace in Canada before coming to Britain.

John Brown

Born into enslavement in Virginia in 1818, John Brown liberated himself and reached Canada, where he joined with a group of Cornish miners, and all returned to England together. During his lectures in England, Brown encouraged boycotts of goods produced by enslaved labour, sang songs, and exhibited drawings and instruments of torture. In 1854, Brown published Slave Life in Georgia: A Narrative of the Life, Sufferings, and Escape of John Brown, A Fugitive Slave, and settled in London. He married a white English woman whose name we do not yet know and began a career as a botanist and herbalist.

Fellow freedom fighter Francis Fedric, who experienced enslavement in Virginia, reached Canada when he was fifty years old and was employed by the Anti-Slavery Society, a prominent abolitionist organisation formed in 1851. Fedric married a white Englishwoman living in Toronto, originally from Devon in England. In 1857, they both moved to England and Fedric orchestrated a lecturing tour, before the family settled in Manchester. In 1859, he published Life and Sufferings of Francis Fedric and a revised edition followed four years later titled, Slave Life in Virginia and Kentucky.

Jacob D. Green also reached Canada but then moved to Britain. Born into enslavement in Maryland, Green became a leading antislavery campaigner, author, orator, and transatlantic civil rights campaigner. He orchestrated a lecturing tour of England and in 1864 published his autobiography Narrative of the Life of J. D. Green, a Runaway Slave, from Kentucky, Containing an Account of His Three Escapes, in 1839, 1846, and 1848 in Huddersfield. Two years before, he was living and labouring just outside Manchester as a brickmaker, and married Ellen Booth, an English woman and widow, at Manchester Cathedral.

After securing his self-liberation from Virginia, Nelson Countee briefly settled in Canada before travelling to Britain to lecture on US enslavement and temperance. He married a white Englishwoman named Maria and had five children (Charles William, Louisa Maria, Mary Ann, Lucy, and Florence), some of whom sang alongside him during his lectures. He died just outside Leicester in 1886.

Last but by no means least, James Alfred Johnson was born into enslavement in North Carolina. He fought for his liberation and eventually settled in England. After suffering severe racism and poverty, he married Sarah Ellen Preston in 1869, “through whose instrumentality and patience I have acquired the blessed boons of being able to read and write” and they lived in Oldham together. 

Preston was a native of Oldham, 29 years old and a “cotton reeler” but tragically died in 1886. A few years later, in 1891, Johnson married again, this time to Mary Ann Cook, a 38-year old widow. In the late 1870s, he wrote his autobiography The Life of James Johnson An Escaped Slave, From the Southern States of America that was eventually published in 1914 as The Life of the Late James Johnson (Coloured Evangelist), an Escaped Slave From the Southern States of America, 40 Years Resident in Oldham, England in Oldham.

More research is needed into the interracial marriages of Black American freedom fighters in Britain 

This work represents a mere fraction of the interracial marriages that took place between Black Americans and white British women during the 19th century. There are still many questions surrounding their names, birth and death dates, and their children. What were their experiences of labouring in Britain and living in an interracial marriage? What injustices did they or their children face? Were there communities that helped and supported them?

For example, John Williams, born into enslavement in New Orleans, was living and labouring in Bristol for a short period of time and published an autobiography in 1855 recounting his traumatic experiences in the US. He mentions starting a family, but as yet there is no extant information on his marriage and children – though this was possibly an interracial family too. 

In doing such vital work, though, we can start to piece together information regarding these families, their interracial marriages, their joys and sorrows, the lives of their children, and the inspiring and courageous battles many of them were forced to endure while in Britain and abroad.

Dr Hannah-Rose Murray is a historian based at the University of Suffolk. Her research focuses on Black American activism in Britain and Ireland during the nineteenth century. She has organised numerous collaborative community and public engagement events including talks, heritage plaques, performances, podcasts, plays, exhibitions and walking tours on both sides of the Atlantic. Read more about her work at frederickdouglassinbritain.com 

Murray

Learn more

Read more of Hannah Rose Murray’s research at frederickdouglassinbritain.com

Visit the website of historian Jeffrey Green at jeffreygreen.co.uk 

Find out more about Mary and William G. Allen’s time in Ireland, along with other American mixed couples in our Mixed Race Families in Ireland, 1700-2000 exhibition.