ABSTRACT
It was, however, a mark that the pre-Civil War highpoint of transatlantic abolitionism had been passed by the mid-1840s that Frederick Douglass, whose travels to Britain made him as well-known for a period in reform and benevolent circles on this as on his own side of the Atlantic, had to argue for the worth of the British reformers’ critical attention towards the United States. Why Elizur Wright’s confidence in 1835 that ‘Moral force cannot be bounded by geographical lines, rivers or oceans. The cry of foreign interference cannot stop it’ was lost and how it was connected to the activities Anglo-American abolitionists undertook will be the subject of the second half of this chapter. The first part sketches not only the range of connections and activities across the Atlantic from Granville Sharp onwards but suggests why it was plausible for abolitionists in England to believe that their culture of reform was part of a continuum with the Americans’.2
