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ABSTRACT
Jacob D. Green’s speaking career in England (1863-66) is an exploration of how an independent, self-financed Black speaker became a networked abolitionist building on the achievements of other expatriate African American activists like Moses Roper and James Watkins. Born enslaved in Maryland, Green made serial escapes from enslavement in Kentucky and elsewhere in the United States, sojourning in Toronto before arriving in Lancashire at about age forty-eight with evidently few funds. Green appealed to cotton and woollen mill town residents to oppose enslavement and the Confederate States of America from where most of North-West England’s cotton originated. He initially lectured under the sponsorship of nonconformist ministers in Yorkshire and built a network that included ministers in the United Methodist Free Church, Congregational Union, capitalists, and tradespeople. Nonconformist sponsorship led to an 1864 move to Heckmondwike in the centre of his lecture circuit. He connected with those who sponsored other Black abolitionists, burgeoning his network by speaking in West Yorkshire towns and cities that had hosted African American orators before. As a networked abolitionist, he earned income from speaking and publishing an autobiography and may have died in England in 1866.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Kate Tiller, ‘Patterns of Dissent: The Social and Religious Geography of Nonconformity in Three Counties’, International Journal of Regional and Local History 13 (2018): 4–31; Leonard Smith, Religion and the Rise of Labour: Nonconformity and the Independent Labour Movement in Lancashire and the West Riding, 1880–1914 (Keele: Ryburn, 1993); Katrina Navickas, ‘Moors, Fields, and Popular Protest in South Lancashire and the West Riding of Yorkshire, 1800-1848’’ Northern History 46 (2009): 93–111; D. G. Hey, ‘The Pattern of Nonconformity in South Yorkshire, 1660–1851’, Northern History 8 (1973): 86–118; K. S. Inglis, ‘English Nonconformity and Social Reform, 1880–1900’, Past & Present 13 (1958): 73–88; Russell E. Richey, ‘The Origins of British Radicalism: The Changing Rationale for Dissent’, Eighteenth-Century Studies 7, no. 2 (1973): 179–92.
2 Hannah-Rose Murray, Advocates of Freedom: African American Transatlantic Abolitionism in the British Isles (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 14–5, 54–5; Fionnghuala Sweeney & Bruce E. Baker, ‘“I am not a beggar”: Moses Roper, Black Witness and the Lost Opportunity of British Abolitionism’, Slavery & Abolition 43, no. 3 (2022): 632–67; J. R. Oldfield, The Ties that Bind: Transatlantic Abolitionism in the Age of Reform, c. 1820–1865 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2020); George Henry Whittaker, ‘Nonconformity in north east Lancashire 1662-1962’ (MA thesis, Durham University, 1981); Paul Walker, ‘Moses Roper (1815-?) An African-American Baptist in Victorian England (1835-44)’, Baptist Quarterly 4, no. 3 (2007): 296–302.
3 J. D. Green, 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 (Huddersfield: Henry Fielding, 1864), 27.
4 Fionnghuala Sweeney, Frederick Douglass and the Atlantic World (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2007); Celeste-Marie Bernier, ‘“Iron Arguments”: Spectacle, Rhetoric and the Slave Body in New England and British Antislavery Oratory’, European Journal of American Culture 26, no. 1, (2007): 57–78; Celeste-Marie Bernier and Andrew Taylor, If I Survive: Frederick Douglass and Family in the Walter O. Evans Collection (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018); Ezra Greenspan, William Wells Brown, An African American Life (New York: W. W. Norton, 2014); David W. Blight, Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2018); R. J. M. Blackett, Building an Antislavery Wall: Black Americans in the Atlantic Abolitionist Movement, 1830–1860 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1983); Martha J. Cutter, ‘Performing Fugitivity: Henry Box Brown on the Nineteenth-Century British Stage’, Slavery & Abolition 42, no. 3 (2021): 632–52; Suzette A. Spencer, ‘An International Fugitive: Henry Box Brown, Anti-Imperialism, Resistance & Slavery’, Social Identities 12, no. 2 (2006): 227–48; Van Gosse, ‘“As a Nation, the English Are Our Friends”: The Emergence of African American Politics in the British Atlantic World, 1772–1861’. The American Historical Review 113, no. 4 (2008): 1003–28; Alan J. Rice and Martin Crawford, eds., Liberating Sojourn: Frederick Douglass and Transatlantic Reform (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1999); Kennetta Hammond Perry, ‘Black Futures Not Yet Lost: Imagining Black British Abolitionism’, South Atlantic Quarterly 121, no. 3 (2022): 541–60; Audrey Fisch, American Slaves in Victorian England: Abolitionist Politics in Popular Literature and Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Jeff Green, Black Americans in Victorian Britain, (London: Pen & Sword History, 2018).
5 Marriage Certificate 354, Jacob David Green and Ellen Booth, May 19, 1862, Manchester Cathedral, Manchester, England, Marriages and Banns, 1754–1930 https://www.ancestry.com (accessed August 10, 2023).
6 For more on transatlantic abolition, see R. J. M. Blackett, Divided Hearts: Britain and the American Civil War (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2000) and Blackett, Building an Antislavery Wall; Fisch, American Slaves in Victorian England; Green, Black Americans in Victorian Britain, Murray, Advocates of Freedom. Other notable Black American abolitionist speakers include Henry Highland Garnet, Alexander Crummell, Samuel Ringgold Ward, William G. Allen, Josiah Henson, James Watkins, John Brown, Henry ‘Box’ Brown, Turner Williams, Edmond Kelley, James C. Thompson, Washington Duff, John Andrew Jackson and Julia Jackson, Charles Lenox Remond, Sarah Parker Remond, William Howard Day, William Troy, William M. Mitchell, Francis Fedric, J. Hughes, Edward Irving, William Andrew Jackson, R.M. Johnson, John Sella Martin, and Lewis Smith.
7 Huddersfield Chronicle, February 14, 1863, 8 (quotations); B. Nightingale, The Story of the Lancashire Congregational Union, 1806–1906 (Manchester: John Heywood, Ltd., 1906), chap. 2; John Avison, 1871 U.K. Census, Yorkshire, Saddleworth, Uppermill, p.12, https://www.ancestry.com (accessed July 11, 2023); David Blight, Douglass, chap. 16; Hannah-Rose Murray, ‘Frederick Douglass in Britain and Ireland’, http://frederickdouglassinbritain.com/Map:Abolitionists/ (accessed August 11, 2023).
8 William White, Directory of Bradford, Halifax Wakefield … (Sheffield: William White, 1866), 812; Huddersfield Chronicle, May 15, 1858, 8.
9 Huddersfield Chronicle, April 4, 1863 (quotations); James G. Miall, Congregationalism in Yorkshire: A Chapter of Modern Church History (London: John Snow and Co., 1868), 285–86; 1851 U.K. Census, Yorkshire, Huddersfield borough, Huddersfield township, p.20, https://www.ancestry.com (accessed July 11, 2023)
10 Murray, ‘Frederick Douglass in Britain and Ireland’.
11 Frederick Douglass, Narrative of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave. Written by Himself (Wortley, 1846); Benjamin Crompton Chisley/William Jones, A Short Narrative of Benjamin Crompton Chisley/ William Jones (Manchester: 1851); Henry ‘Box’ Brown, Narrative of the Life of Henry Box Brown, Written by Himself (Manchester, 1851); James Watkins, Narrative of the Life of James Watkins, Formerly A Slave in Maryland (Manchester: Printed for James Watkins, 1859); James Alfred Johnson, The Life of the Late James Johnson (Coloured Evangelist), an Escaped Slave From the Southern States of America (Oldham: W. Galley, 1914).
12 Barnsley Chronicle, March 3, 1860, 8; J. R. Balme, American States, Churches, and Slavery (Edinburgh: William P. Nimmo, 1862), 548; Miall, Congregationalism in Yorkshire, 270; Murray, ‘Frederick Douglass in Britain and Ireland’.
13 Green Narrative, iv (very able quotation); British Standard May 31, 1861, 1, (deep conviction quotation); Huddersfield Chronicle, April 4, 1863, 5.
14 Green, Narrative, iii.
15 Murray, Advocates of Freedom, chap. 2; Terry Baxter, Frederick Douglass’s Curious Audiences: Ethos in the Age of the Consumable Subject (New York: Routledge, 2004); Susan Marie Ogden-Malouf, ‘American Revivalism and Temperance Drama: Evangelical Protestant Ritual and Theatre in Rochester, New York, 1830-1845’ (Ph.D. diss., Northwestern University, 1981); Tom F. Wright, Lecturing the Atlantic: Speech, Print, and an Anglo-American Commons 1830–1870 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017).
16 Green, Narrative, iii (quotation); William R. McNaughton, The Scottish Congregational Ministry, 1794–1993 (Glasgow: Congregational Union of Scotland, 1993), 21, 87.
17 Leeds Mercury, January 7, 1860, 5; Bradford Review, December 10, 1863, 2.
18 Joyce Burnette, Gender, Work and Wages in Industrial Revolution Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008); S. A. Caunce, ‘Complexity, Community Structure and Competitive Advantage within the Yorkshire Woollen Industry, c. 1700–1850’, Business History 39, no. 4 (1997): 26–43; Swire Smith, ‘The Woollen and Worsted Trades’, in Protection and Industry (New York: Routledge, 2018 [1904]), 1–14.
19 Caunce, ‘Complexity, Community Structure and Competitive Advantage within the Yorkshire Woollen Industry’.
20 Bradford Review, September 12, 1863, 5 (quotations); Bradford Observer, March 5, 1863; D. G. Wright, ‘Bradford and the American Civil War’, Journal of British Studies 8, no. 2 (1969): 69–85.
21 R.J.M Blackett, Divided Hearts: Britain and the American Civil War (Baton Rouge: Louisiana University State Press, 2001), 6–7; 25–6; 133–4.
22 Alan Rice, “The Cotton That Connects, The Cloth That Binds,” Atlantic Studies 4, no. 2, (2007), 295–9.
23 Sven Beckert, Empire of Cotton: A Global History (New York: Knopf, 2014), chap. 9; Nicola Marie Holmes, ‘The Impact of the Cotton Famine on the Lace Industry in Nottingham: Economy, Poverty and Global Connections 1861-1865’, (MA thesis, Open University, 2022); Blackett, Divided Hearts, chap. 5.
24 The Sheffield Daily Telegraph, June 29, 1864, 1.
25 Green, Narrative, p.35; 40;
26 Murray and McKivigan, Frederick Douglass in Britain and Ireland 1845-1895.
27 The Leeds Intelligencer, August 3, 1850, 5.
28 The Leeds Mercury, May 24, 1851, 5.
29 Huddersfield and Holmfirth Chronicle, September 13, 1851, 4; Huddersfield and Holmfirth Chronicle, September 27, 1851, 7.
30 Huddersfield and Holmfirth Examiner January 29, 1853, 5; Huddersfield and Holmfirth Examiner February 19, 1853, 5; Sheffield and Rotherham Independent, August 5, 1854, 2; The Leeds Intelligencer, October 15, 1853, 7.
31 The Leeds Intelligencer, December 3, 1853, 8.
32 The Leeds Mercury, October 23, 1856, 2; The Leeds Intelligencer, November 8, 1856, 6; The Halifax Courier, January 8, 1853, 5.
33 The Leeds Intelligencer, November 1, 1856, 7.
34 The Leeds Intelligencer, December 24, 1858, 5.
35 Anti-Slavery Advocate, February 1, 1860, 306; The Barnsley Chronicle, November 24, 1860, 4; The Wakefield Free Press, February 28, 1863, 5.
36 The Bradford Review, June 22, 1861, 8; The Bradford Review, March 21, 1863, 4; The Sheffield Daily Telegraph, November 7, 1860, 2; Sheffield and Rotherham Independent, November 10, 1860, 8; Sheffield and Rotherham Independent, November 15, 1861, 1; Sheffield and Rotherham Independent, December 20, 1861, 2; Sheffield and Rotherham Independent, January 17, 1862, 3; Sheffield and Rotherham Independent, July 14, 1863, 8; Sheffield and Rotherham Independent, November 26, 1863, 3.
37 Sheffield and Rotherham Independent, January 29, 1869, 3.
38 Watkins, Narrative of James Watkins (1852).
39 James Watkins, Struggles for Freedom; or The Life of James Watkins, Formerly a Slave in Maryland, U.S. (Manchester, 1860).
40 Watkins, Narrative (1852), 42–3.
41 Watkins, Narrative (1859), 51.
42 Watkins Narrative (1859), 52.
43 Watkins, Struggles for Freedom (1860); Watkins, Narrative (1852); Bolton Chronicle, September 16, 1854, 8; Barnsley Chronicle, June 16, 1860, 8; Leeds Intelligencer, February 25, 1854, 6; Ashton Weekly Reporter, April 28, 1855, 3; Leeds Times, February 18, 1854, 5; Sweeney and Baker, ‘“I am not a beggar”’, 5-7; Paul Walker, ‘Moses Roper (1815-91) African American Baptist Anti-Slavery Lecturer and Birmingham Nonconformity’, Baptist Quarterly, 44, no. 2 (2011): 99-114; Douglas C. Strange, British Unitarians against American Slavery, 1833–65 (Vancouver: Fairleigh Dickinson Press, 1984).
44 Bradford Review, November 7, 1863, 8 (quotations); 1861 UK Census, Yorkshire, Bingley, District 13 (Cullingworth), p.98, https://www.ancestry.com (accessed August 4, 2023).
45 Sheffield, Eng., Supplement to the Sheffield and Rotherham Independent, January 22, 1860, 10.
46 Watkins, Narrative (1852); Roper, Narrative (1838); Sweeney and Baker, ‘“I Am Not a Beggar”’; John Sekora, ‘Black Message/White Envelope: Genre, Authenticity, and Authority in the Antebellum Slave Narrative’, Callaloo 32 (1987): 482–515.
47 William L. Andrews, To Tell a Free Story: The First Century of Afro-American Autobiography, 1760–1865 (Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1986), 209–10; Yolanda Pierce, ‘The Narrative of the Life of JD Green, A Runaway Slave: Some New Thoughts on an Old Form’, ANQ: A Quarterly Journal of Short Articles, Notes and Reviews 14, no. 4 (2001): 15–23.
48 Green, Narrative.
49 Ripley, ‘Biography of Moses Roper,’ https://www.docsouth.unc.edu/fpn/roper/bio.html (accessed September 22, 2023); Richard Huzzey, Freedom Burning: Anti-slavery and Empire in Victorian Britain (New York: Cornell University Press, 2012), 33–4; Blackett, Building an Antislavery Wall, 25–27. Watkins, Struggles for Freedom (1862).
50 Yorkshire Gazette, November 25, 1865, 11; Leeds Times, April 7, 1866, 4; Leeds Intelligencer, January 27, 1866, 5.
51 Green, Narrative, iii-iv.
52 Staffordshire Advertiser, June 27, 1840, 3.
53 Michaël Roy, ‘Cheap Editions, Little Books, and Handsome Duodecimos: A Book History Approach to Antebellum Slave Narratives,’ MELUS, 40, no. 3 (2015): 69–93.
54 Bristol Times, April 13, 1850, 4; Gloucester Journal, May 24, 1851, 3.
55 Cornish Telegraph, November 7, 1855, 1; South Eastern Gazette, September 16, 1856, 8.
56 Huddersfield Chronicle February 27, 1864, 8 (quotations); Huddersfield Chronicle, November 27, 1858, 5; Congregational Register of the West Riding of Yorkshire 8 (1862): 130-32; William White, Directory of Bradford, Halifax Wakefield … (Sheffield: William White, 1866), 811-812.
57 Herbert Heaton, The Yorkshire Woollen and Worsted Industries (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965); Gregory, Regional Transformation and Industrial Revolution; Pat Hudson, The Genesis of Industrial Capital: A Study of the West Riding Wool Textile Industry c.1750-1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986).
58 E. C. Gaskell, The Life of Charlotte Brontë (New York: Appleton, 1857), 101.
59 Frank Peel, Spen Valley, Past and Present (Heckmondwike: Senior, 1893), 442.
60 Frank Peel, Nonconformity in Spen Valley (Heckmondwike: Senior, 1891), 258 (quotation); chap. 24; J. Horsfall Turner, Nonconformity in Idle with the History of Airedale College (Bradford: Brear, 1876), 189; Congregational Register of the West Riding of Yorkshire 8 (1862): 133-36; James Watkins, Struggles for Freedom (1860).
61 Leeds Mercury, March 7, 1864, 3.
62 Leeds Mercury, March 7, 1864, 3; White, Directory of Bradford, Halifax Wakefield … , 503-07, 545, 635-40.
63 Bolton Chronicle, December 20, 1851, 7; Banner of Ulster, November 22, 1856, 1.
64 Western Courier, December 22, 1852, 5.
65 West Surrey Times, August 30, 1856, 3.
66 R.J.M. Blackett, Divided Hearts: Britain and the American Civil War (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2001), 46–7; Aaron D. McClendon, “Sounds of Sympathy: William Wells Brown’s ‘Anti-Slavery Harp’, Abolition, and the Culture of Early and Antebellum American Song,” African American Review, 47:1 (Spring 2014): 84–6.
67 Green, Narrative, 42–43.
68 Ibid.,, 28–33.
69 Welshman, or General Advertising Chronicle for the Principality, June 15, 1838, 3; Worcestershire Chronicle, December 4, 1839, 4.
70 Jennifer Putzi, ‘American Slave: African American Manhood and the Marked Body in Nineteenth-Century Abolitionist Literature’, Studies in American Fiction 30, no. 2, (2002): 184–6. See also Bernier, “Iron Arguments”. Marcus Wood, Slavery, Empathy, and Pornography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), chap. 5; Murray, Advocates of Freedom, chap. 1.
71 James Watkins handbill; The Derby Mercury, 9 April 1856, 4.
72 See chapter 5 in Marcus Wood, Slavery, Empathy and Pornography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002).
73 Bernier, “Iron Arguments”.
74 Clare Midgley, ‘Slave sugar boycotts, female activism and the domestic base of British anti-slavery culture.’ Slavery and Abolition 17, no. 3 (1996): 137–162; Alison Twells, ‘‘We Ought to Obey God Rather Than Man’: Women, Anti-Slavery and Nonconformist Religious Culture.’ Women, Dissent and Anti-Slavery in Britain and America, 1790–1865 (2011); Blackett, Divided Hearts, chap. 2.
75 Sheffield & Rotherham Independent 22 July 1862, 4.
76 Murray, ‘Frederick Douglass in Britain and Ireland’.
77 Barnsley Chronicle, December 1, 1860, 8; Wakefield Free Press, August 27, 1864, 8.
78 Wakefield Free Press, August 27, 1864, 8 (quotations); White, Directory of Bradford, Halifax Wakefield, 826, 848; ‘Bethel Chapel Research’, Wakefield Historical Society, https://www.wakefieldhistoricalsociety.org.uk/projects/wakefield-waterfront/our-research/bethel-chapel-research/, (accessed August 8, 2023).
79 Leeds Mercury May 10, 1865, 3.
80 ‘Resolutions Passed at a Meeting Held by the Inhabitants of Heckmondwike,’ in The Assassination of Abraham Lincoln: Appendix to Diplomatic Correspondence of 1865 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1866), 233–34; William White, Directory and Topography of the Boroughs of Leeds . . . (Sheffield: Robert Leader, 1858), 606, 636–38; Peel, Spen Valley Past and Present, chaps. 15–16; Turner, Nonconformity in Idle, 189.
81 David A. Bateman, Disenfranchising Democracy: Constructing the Electorate in the United States, the United Kingdom, and France (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018), chap. 5.
82 North Cheshire Herald January 6, 1866, 2; 1861 Census of England, Yorkshire, Heckmondwike, District 3, p.55, https://www.ancestry.com (accessed July 31, 2023).
83 Patrick Rael, ‘A Common Nature, A United Destiny: African American Responses to Racial Science from the Revolution to the Civil War’, in Prophets of Protest: Reconsidering the History of American Abolitionism, ed. Timothy Patrick McCarthy and John Stauffer (New York: New Press, 2006), 187–191; Patrick Rael, Black Identity and Black Protest in the Antebellum North (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 243–7. Worcestershire Chronicle, December 4, 1839, 4; Hannah-Rose Murray, ‘“Did He Ever Hear of Egypt or Carthage?”: Moses Roper’s Literary and Oratorical Activism in the British Isles’, Kalfou, 9, no. 2 (2022): 415–436.
84 Green, Narrative, 5-6; North Cheshire Herald, January 6, 1866, 2.
85 Heckmondwike Westgate United Methodist Free Church, Membership Register (ref. no. C439/6/47), 1857–1873, Wakefield Archives.
86 Marriage Certificate of Ellen Green and Joseph Sykes, February 11, 1867, Methodist Free Church, Heckmondwike, https://www.ancestry.com (accessed August 8, 2023).
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Hannah-Rose Murray
Hannah-Rose Murray is a lecturer and teaching fellow in the School of History, Queen Mary University of London, Mile End Road, London E1 4NS, UK.
Calvin Schermerhorn
Calvin Schermerhorn is a Professor in the School of Historical, Philosophical, and Religious Studies, Arizona State University, 975 S. Myrtle Ave., Box 874302, Tempe, Arizona 85287-4302, USA