On the anniversary of British Emancipation on August 1, 1834, revisiting an old post on freedom and abolitionism in the steampunk Atlantic–or lack thereof.

Image: Broadside advertising abolitionist August First commemoration in Worcester, MA, 1849. Boston Public Library.

I wrote this post 12 years ago–when I used this blog to talk about science fiction, history, and social issues. Back then I asked the question, why aren’t there more abolitionists in steampunk? That’s not to say, abolitionists haven’t figured into genre. In horror comic books author David Crownson and illustrator Courtland Ellis have had Harriet Tubman slaying literal monsters in Harriet Tubman: Demon Slayer. Issues of slavery and emancipation have popped up in fantasy works ranging from Naomi Novik’s Temeraire the Dragon series to R.F. Kuang’s anti-colonialist masterpiece Babel.

But I’m still hard-pressed to find the topic as central within steampunk, which is glaring given that the time periods often overlap. Hey, I’m a published author now so I’ll take myself to task. Admittedly, the closest I’ve touched on it is in my novella The Black God’s Drums, where slavery and freedom provides a backdrop to an alt-world steampunk New Orleans. But it’s still not exactly about abolitionism. So, what gives? I don’t have answers. But on August 1, the anniversary of British Emancipation, I return to this question in this re-post. And I’m very open to hearing about short stories or novels I may have missed. Article is updated a bit.

Is it just me, or does steampunk have an abolitionist problem–or rather, a lack of them? Okay. Perhaps I’m over generalizing. I haven’t read/seen every steampunk story after all. But I’ve noticed that some of the more popular works in the genre, those few that courageously even bother to address slavery, manage to leave out (or somehow weed-out through deft alternative history-making) those figures and groups that were so instrumental in bringing about the end of the slave system in the Atlantic world.

Beginning with Haiti in 1804, the varied institutions of chattel human bondage began to fall one-by-one in the Americas, the final holdout being Brazil in 1888–marking what was likely one of the greatest moral human triumphs of the 19th century. So why is it that in many of the steampunk works that spend so much time re-imagining and reshaping this era, the struggle waged against slavery remains remarkably silent? In the film Abraham Lincoln Vampire Hunter, nearly no abolitionists are mentioned at all (save for an inserted re-characterization of Harriet Tubman); instead, Lincoln is passed off as an abolitionist, even though he was not one. Cherie Priest’s remarkable Civil War themed steampunk novels give us the POV of Confederate spies and nurses, insurgent New Orleans creoles of color, outlaw ex-slave gun-toting airship pirates and more–but, her world (while wonderfully done( leaves little room for abolitionists. Some of the more politically minded stuff (covered in articles like Suffragette Steampunk), at least include nods to antislavery or passing references to abolitionism–though not as a central theme. Bloggers like Steampunk Emma Goldman also do some great historical pieces on black abolitionists like Ohio’s Langston Mercer, but my critique is aimed at the creative side of the genre. About the only creative work I’ve seen that includes an abolitionist as the main protagonist, is the indie Chronicles of Harriet by Balogun Ojetade, in which Harriet Tubman is recast as a gun-toting fighter of slavery and the mystic world.

Still, an organized antislavery movement appears to be MIA in much of the steampunk I’ve encountered. The William Lloyd Garrisons, Frederick Douglasses and Angelina Grimkés of the era don’t seem to make it into the lore of cogs, gears and airships. Neither do their counterparts across the Atlantic–the Granville Sharps, Olaudah Equianos or Elizabeth Heyricks. Yet these figures (or at least their legacies) were deeply entrenched in the Victorian Era that steampunk enthusiasts so studiously imitate. Though Queen Victoria would not take the English throne until 1837, the age that bears her name is often associated with the Reform Act of 1832. Quite possibly the next great event to mark Britain during the Victorian Era, and its notions of human progress and morality, was the passage on August 28th 1833 for An Act for the Abolition of Slavery. The law, which would not come into effect until a year later, abolished legal chattel slavery throughout the British Empire and put in its place a form of “labour apprenticeship” that in many of its Caribbean colonies continued slavery in form if not need, until ending prematurely in 1838. Despite such flaws, on August 1st of 1834 some 800,000 men, women and children were freed from bondage in the British colonies, the majority of which lived in the West Indies.

Britain was not the first nation-state to abolish slavery. After all, Britain had been the dominant purveyor of the slave trade throughout the 18th-century, putting the earlier Portuguese and Spanish progenitor’s of the trade to shame. Millions of enslaved Africans traveled in the hulls of British ships to toil in places from Virginia to Barbados. No, the unprecedented honor of being the first to abolish slavery in the modern world goes to the revolutionary Black leaders of Saint-Domingue who created Haiti with gunpowder, iron and blood in 1804. And the impact of that triumph was certainly felt in the British Empire, who was left to ponder the dangers of holding fellow human beings in unspeakable bondage. Britain would be the first of the great European Empires to abolish slavery, for reasons that still remain a matter of debate. *Note: France, pushed by the dynamics of slave insurrections in places like Saint-Domingue and Guadeloupe and its own heady revolutionary ideals, had previously abolished slavery in 1794–but then restored it (bloodily so) in 1802, and did not abolish it again fully until 1848. So sorry France, no first prize for you.

The battle against human bondage in England had long roots, tracing back at least to its convoluted use as a propaganda tool during the American Revolution. The 13 colonies called themselves slaves; the British retorted, “no, that would be those guys who grow your tobacco and rice–hypocrites;” the Americans replied, “yeah, well at least we’re not the leading slave traders in the world, Mr. Morality.” And so it went. In the years following, a coalition of Quakers, moral philosophers and reformers, free black Britons, women’s groups and more, launched a massive campaign first against the highly lucrative English slave trade (abolished in Britain in 1807) and then against the prosperous slave industry–both of which were as powerfully entrenched as big oil is today, and backed up by the leading merchant and banking class of the era. In a miraculous and complicated turn of events, they won, in no small part due to the rebellious activities of enslaved people in the Caribbean colonies who remained abolition’s vanguard. That story sits at the very heart of the Victorian Era, and was used to triumph the moral and social progress of Britain in the 19th century–yes, even as it expanded the Empire in Asia and Africa, but that’s a whole notha’ blog. Most interesting for the purpose of this post, the success of anti-slavery in Britain directly influenced their cousins across the pond, as American abolitionists adapted tactics and strategies from English reformers. In the United States, for several decades, the commemoration of August 1st thus became vitally important for the antislavery struggle.

From the mid 1830s onwards, antislavery activists in the Northeastern US held numerous church services to commemorate British Abolition in the West Indies. On Monday, 1 August 1836, free African Amerians in Catskill, New York commemorated the anniversary of British abolition at their Baptist church; August 1838, several Black churches held devotionals and meetings in Newark, New Jersey; and from 1834 to 1842 annual services, “scripture readings, prayers, addresses and commemorative dinners” were held by Boston’s Black community at Belknap Street Church.

These church services gave way to larger celebrations, called August 1st or West India Day. By the 1840s, commemorations of British Abolition in the US took on a more festive atmosphere, influenced by the street spectacles of greater democratic participation that marked the changing dynamics of American politics. The anniversary of British emancipation was celebrated with lavish parades, speeches and rallying cries for the end of American slavery. An 1844 August 1st celebration in Hingham, Massachusetts gives insight, where throngs of men, women and children, black and white, streamed into Hingham from surrounding regions. They came not only to celebrate the freedom granted to 800,000 British slaves in the Caribbean, but to push their own nation towards eventual abolition. In the procession marshals were said to “carry truncheons and wear gold stars…struck in Great Britain in commemoration of the First of August, 1834.” There were as well “Similar stars…distributed among the crowd…the Star of the North, the fugitive’s only compass.” On one side of these stars was “a picture of a shackled…Negro…wrists bound by chains…. Below the ground on which he kneels is the legend, ‘A voice from Great Britain to America 1834.” On the opposite side, “a Negro stands upright, arms stretched out…with broken shackles….On the ground lie other broken irons, beneath his feet a broken whip—symbols of his new freedom.” In the center is written “Jubilee, Aug. 1 1834.”

Along with such symbols both celebrating British abolition and urging national emancipation, banners were carried with differing mottos written upon them. One banner was said to declare, “No union with slaveholders”–echoing Garrison’s radical position of disunionism, which in part declared the Constitution an immoral, invalid document for compromising with slavery. From towns in Essex, one banner placed British abolition and American slavery within Republican themes, with a decidedly ironic flair: “Shall a republic which could not bear the bonds of a king, cradle a bondage which a king has abolished?” A banner from Boston depicted “a slave at sunrise on the 1st of Aug. 1834…the chains falling from his limbs” with the motto, “This is the Lord’s doing.”

Prominent figures such as Frederick Douglas spoke often at West India Day celebrations. White abolitionists of note from William Lloyd Garrison to early radicals like the Jewish feminist Ernestine Rose to thinkers like Ralph Waldo Emerson, gave speeches–some of them harsh–on antislavery. Guests from London, Canada and the Caribbean were invited to speak out against slavery, and participate in the festivities of freedom. The commemoration united abolitionists, Black and white, in cities and towns throughout the northern United States with free Blacks from the British West Indies, British Canada, and Britain proper. August 1st thus served as a powerful political statement of antislavery sentiment that crossed national and oceanic boundaries.

Especially featured at West India Day events were all-black militias, in full military regalia. Organized and disciplined Black militias emerged out of a need to protect free African Americans from white mobs in Northern cities (who violently drove Black people from public events like July 4th with bricks and bats in places like Boston), and helped protect escaped slaves from slave-catchers. Highlighting their importance, they became a staple at many of the August 1st celebrations, with the hopes that “a spectacle of militancy” would “deter would-be aggressors.” This martial atmosphere was evident throughout the breadth of the antislavery parades, where regular participants marched in single file lines, and carried banners and symbols indicative of military style. Among the marchers were Black soldiers as well as sailors, some of whom had served in British regiments and naval vessels. In Canada there was a similar presence of Black soldiers, members of the Queen Victoria Rifle Guards and other militias who served alongside the British army, who marched in West India Day commemorations.

Frederick Douglas, witnessing these independent Black military units march in an August 1st parade in New Bedford, Massachusetts, voiced his pride at seeing them. A Mrs. Q, watching a Black militia drill in Staten Island, voiced both pride and challenge to whites who would see fit to disturb Black celebrants with violence, asking, “who [would] are molest, or make us afraid?” West India Day’s disappearance in the US was ironically a product of its success.

With the end of the Civil War,  August 1st celebrations went into decline in the United States, gradually fading, and eventually replaced by more nationalist celebrations. As early as the post-Emancipation Proclamation years, even before the end of the Civil War, this trend was already underway. In a correspondence from Chicago in the August 3, 1864 Philadelphia Inquirer, it was noted, “It has heretofore been the custom of the colored people of Chicago to have a grand demonstration on the 1st of August—a celebration of the anniversary of West India emancipation; but this they have abandoned, and now celebrate as their day of Jubilee Lincoln’s Proclamation of freedom to the African race, on the 1st of January.”

August 1st commemorations would linger on in some places until the 1880s, after which they mostly disappeared. As enslaved people become free and African American became citizens (even if partially so), the commemoration of an event outside of the national memory became less relevant than one that took place squarely in the American narrative. Instead, it was suggested African Americans celebrate the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1st. Or the ratification of the 13th Amendment. Others celebrated Abraham Lincoln’s birthday. More local celebrations, like in Richmond Virginia, commemorated the fall of the Confederacy. West India Day’s diminishing role and replacement by these nationalist celebrations on emancipation was thus a form of both nation-making in the US and the forging of emergent African American identity. And somehow, over the past century, it became mostly forgotten.

In the end, many of those nationalist emancipation celebrations also fell by the wayside for various reasons. Some disappeared because in the Jim Crow South such celebrations were dangerous. Other times they vanished because cynical African Americans found little to celebrate living under a racial apartheid. Some African Americans even balked at emancipation commemorations, urging that Black people forget the slave past and look forward. In a quirky twist of history and fate, the main commemoration left standing was a small emancipation celebration from Galveston, Texas called Juneteenth–that slowly spread around the United States especially in the post-Civil Rights era. As African Americans once again cast around for a way to remember emancipation, Juneteenth took on a national presence, and became a federal holiday signed by President Joe Biden in 2021. In some ways, Juneteenth shares ties to August First. Both would be the only long sustained and popular emancipation commemorations celebrated simultaneously across cities, towns, and states in America.

Despite being forgotten in the U.S,, August 1st is still commemorated in various parts of the British Caribbean, the UK, Canada and West Africa. Trinidad & Tobago, which had stopped commemorating the day since the early 20th century, in 1985 declared August 1st Emancipation Day–a public holiday in which government offices are closed. It has since regularly held large lavish commemorations that span several days, complete with a re-reading of the British Abolition law, re-enactments of post-Emancipation slave rituals (Canboulay), African heritage festivals and more.

For the steampunk genre, August 1st, with its multi-racial parades and transnational struggle against slavery, holds some interesting possibilities. What would a steampunk version of an August 1st parade in Boston look like–airships emblazoned with the words, “No Union With Slave Holders?” flying overhead? Might the uniforms of an all-Black August 1st militia make for some interesting steampunk cosplay–accented with a few ray guns and air rifles? Anti-slavery patches with some gears and cogs? Perhaps some new interesting gadgetry might find its way into the midst of the abolitionist struggle and the Underground Railroad? What the heck is steampunk John Brown up to in Bleeding Kansas?!? There’s also the whole boundary crossing nature of the antislavery struggle, that united abolitionists in the US with counterparts in England and elsewhere–actors who worked beyond the nation-state. What nefarious pro-slavery plots might more militant abolitionists working across a steampunk Victorian era Atlantic have to come together to thwart?

As is often the case with these ignored or buried aspects of history, there’s quite a lot for the ever-growing steampunk movement to work with–if we can imagine beyond the usual confines of corsets and top hats.