Harriet Martineau's black hero and the American antislavery movement

In 1841 the well-respected British writer Harriet Martineau published The H our and the Man, her account of the Haitian Revolution, specifically to sup port the antislavery movement in the United States. Constrained by white mi ddle-class values, essentialist notions of race, and her particular adaptat ion of utilitarianism, Martineau's "historical romance" of Toussaint L'Ouve rture reveals the strikingly conservative perspective of many of those invo lved in the early antislavery movement in Britain and America. The novel-wi dely read and reviewed by abolitionists-provided a rich and timely resource for those involved in the American movement, which by the end of the 1830s was moving into a more widespread and increasingly political phase. Martin eau presented Toussaint as a black hero, a tragic, larger-than-life hero wh o acted with conviction and courage to defend his people from slavery and w ho, as a general, was finally defeated by the overwhelming numbers and powe r of the French forces. She also affirmed revolution as the almost inevitab le consequence of a slaveholding system, linking Toussaint to the heroes of the American Revolution. Martineau's images and themes would figure in the rhetoric of black and white antislavery writers alike, especially Frederic k Douglass, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Lydia Maria Child, Wendell Phillips, and William Lloyd Garrison. Martineau's presentation of T oussaint made a black man central to the conception of what freed slaves mi ght be capable of accomplishing, and it provided a crucial, if complicated, model for American writers.