Frederick Douglass was perhaps the most successful African American abolitionist to traverse the Atlantic and tour the British Isles. In town halls, churches, taverns, and private parlor rooms across the country he spoke to hundreds of thousands of people, sparking a wave of transatlantic abolition that had a deep impact on the British landscape. While he only traveled to Britain and Ireland three times, the friendships and networks he created, together with his transformative experiences there, shaped, supported and sustained his public antislavery work in the United States for the rest of his life.

Chapters 2 and 3 focus on Frederick Douglass’ transatlantic journey to Britain between 1845 and 1847. Douglass epitomized the successful exploitation of adaptive resistance and showed that his employment of each triad’s element simultaneously could court significant fame. He recognized the essential importance of print culture, however, and as a result altered his relationship with that triad to place it center stage. Hence, Chapter 2 discusses Douglass’ performative strategies and his relationship with print culture. He incorporated both favorable and negative reviews of his lectures into his repertoire, and courted endless debate in the press. His invocation of strategic anglophilia was balanced with a chastisement of British policy that championed liberty without actively seeking to help the enslaved in America. Unlike Roper, Douglass was a virtuoso who could balance assimilationist and dissonant language effectively. As a result, Douglass caused a furor toward slavery that was unrivaled by any other African American within a similar time period.

Chapter 5 concentrates solely on Black female transatlantic tours. Due to the gendered nature of adaptive resistance, a separate chapter is necessary to chart the ways they endured a double embodiment on the Victorian stage to campaign against slavery. I argue that Ellen Craft and Julia Jackson used different versions of adaptive resistance that were conditioned by gender as well as race. Craft used silence as a performative tool, an exploitation of antislavery networks, and even created her own communal networks that were based on racial pride. While in public she exploited her reputation as a “white slave,” in private she was outspoken and was tireless in her enthusiasm to promote abolitionist and other reformist causes. In contrast to Craft’s silent public performance, Julia Jackson lectured several times on the British stage alongside her husband, which possibly made her the first Black American woman to speak publicly about her experience as an enslaved individual. African American women were central to the Black protest tradition in Britain and maintained antislavery sentiment throughout the nineteenth century, decades after the British Empire had legally abolished slavery.

Chapter 3 focuses on Douglass’ relationship with abolitionist networks and print culture. He was a shrewd activist and formed friendships with newspaper editors, prominent citizens who had influence over the local press, and sometimes wrote for newspapers specifically to clarify his opinions or to cause further controversy, such as the Cambria in 1847. The constant exchange of letters and newspaper articles that reported on his speeches maintained essential momentum for the antislavery cause and enhanced a connected feeling of solidarity. This network did have its disadvantages however, as white abolitionists were not free from prejudice and Douglass – like other Black activists – struggled against a white racist schema that threatened to control Black bodies. However, Douglass left Britain more independent and determined to seek his antislavery career outside the realm of white control.

Contemporary Black activists – including those active in the #BlackLivesMatter movement – continue to protest against white supremacy and slavery’s legacies. In the conclusion to this book, I trace how Black Americans who visited Britain as a result of the Ferguson Solidarity Tour in 2015 contributed to this transatlantic tradition of protest and forged their own networks across the country to challenge racism and police brutality. Their methods of organization, protest, and awareness-raising were adapted from their historical precedents and to the contemporary world.

Chapter six explores adaptive resistance in Britain during the American Civil War. Black activists exploited this resistance strategy amongst a climate of growing scientific racism and pro-Confederate sympathy, two factors that were inseparable. Throughout the conflict, Black abolitionists used their testimony to revoke charges of Black inferiority and demanded Britons follow a policy of non-fellowship with slaveholders. Despite abolitionist networks which had dwindled at the start of the war, activists such as William Craft, Sella Martin and William Andrew Jackson lectured on both an abolitionist and non-abolitionist stage with a greater sense of urgency, convinced that the conflict’s outcome would mean either the consolidation or the removal of slavery. Craft and Martin in particular used dissonant language to target scientific racists such as Dr. James Hunt, who lectured and published work on Black inferiority. Hunt avidly supported the South and his friendship with Confederate propagandist Henry Hotze represented the synonymy of a cause that promoted slavery and racism, and as much as possible, Black activists used dissonant language to challenge such theories.

Chapter 7 moves beyond most scholarly accounts of Black abolitionist transatlantic visits to the British Isles and focuses on Josiah Henson in the time period 1876–1877. I analyze his lecturing tour, his visit to Windsor Palace to meet Queen Victoria, and the numerous artistic responses to him, which included a revised performance of Uncle Tom’s Cabin on the stage, a bust in the Royal Academy, and a wax model in Madame Tussaud's. I argue that Henson exploited adaptive resistance in an entirely new age and to do this, he needed to reawaken British interest and lecture about the memory of slavery. He used assimilationist language to capitalize on his association with the character of Uncle Tom from Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin to win fame (and fortune) on the British stage. However, Henson had to negotiate racial stereotypes and work in a climate that whitewashed the nation’s own bloody history of slavery in favor of a romanticized plantation ideal in America. Henson fought against this at every turn and contributed to the Black American protest tradition in Britain a decade after the end of the Civil War.

Chapter 8 focuses on Ida B. Wells’ transatlantic visits to Britain in 1893 and 1894. I argue that Wells, like Henson, exploited adaptive resistance in a new era, but this time redeployed its attention to the legacy of slavery, particularly lynching and racial violence. She sustained the Black protest tradition until the end of the nineteenth century and borrowed from it to create a successful tour in 1894, in particular. Learning from previous activists such as Frederick Douglass, Wells befriended newspaper editors, collected favorable coverage of her lectures, orchestrated interviews in numerous papers, and cultivated reformist networks to raise awareness of lynching. Wells also used a form of visual dissonance within her employment of adaptive resistance: she used photographs of lynched bodies to convince the British people of racial violence, and passed the image around at small meetings as a tool of truth to support her rhetoric. She intervened in traditional white spaces such as Parliament to sustain the Black American protest tradition and remind British audiences they lived and breathed a legacy of slavery.

During their transatlantic journeys to Britain throughout the nineteenth century, African Americans engaged in what I term “adaptive resistance,” a multifaceted interventionist strategy by which they challenged white supremacy and won support for abolition. Alongside my recovery of this mode of self-presentation in sources I have excavated from Victorian newspapers, I use an interdisciplinary methodology to (re)discover black performative strategies on the Victorian stage from the late 1830s to the mid-1890s. Performance was only one strand in the black activist arsenal, however. The successful employment of adaptive resistance relied on a triad of performance, abolitionist networks, and exploitation of print culture, and if an individual ensured an even balance between all three, it was likely their sojourn was successful.

In adopting this resistance strategy, black men and women forged a Black American protest tradition in Britain which was based on their literary, visual, and oratorical testimony. Black men and women sought to make their voices heard in a climate dominated by white supremacy; they refused to capitulate and educated thousands of people on slavery and its legacies through physically and mentally demanding tours organized across Britain.

Chapter 4 focuses on an era where numerous African Americans visited Britain and exploited the rise of popular abolition after the publication of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin in 1852. I argue that while activists such as William Wells Brown and the Reverend Samuel Ward manipulated the interest surrounding the novel to maintain antislavery sentiment, they used the opportunity to chastise and even harshly criticize Britain for its role in the slave trade. The chapter also focuses on two other famous figures in the 1850s, Henry ‘Box’ Brown and Frederick Douglass. ‘Box’ Brown refused to bend to any rule in transatlantic activist history, and while he initially incorporated Stowe’s novel into his visual panorama, he used his savvy business flair and did not solely rely on the text. He constantly reinvented himself and his repertoire to court his celebrity, and even starred in a play based on his own life. Lastly, I explore the reasons why Douglass’ exploitation of adaptive resistance in 1859 was comparatively less successful than his first visit in 1845, in part, he believed, because of the growing racism in British society that would become further entrenched during the Civil War.

Chapter 1 opens with Moses Roper’s lecturing tour in the British Isles. While not an invisible figure in historical scholarship, historians have rendered Roper peripheral in their discussions. Using new evidence, I uncover Roper’s previously unexplored performative techniques, and how he employed adaptive resistance with mixed success. He refused to compromise on his brutal descriptions of slavery, and his experience of torture proved either too upsetting for audiences or invited criticism. Since Victorian racial dynamics decreed that formerly enslaved individuals had to be supported by white networks, Roper’s lecture tour was hindered by his lack of white testimonials, and I analyze how white sabotage affected Roper’s tour. Therefore, his exploitation of the triad of performance, print culture, and abolitionist networks proved difficult compared to individuals such as Frederick Douglass.