The donations of Southern US Presbyterians were not the only financial transactions that preoccupied abolitionists when Douglass was in Scotland in 1846.

They were also committed to raising funds for their own cause. Members of local societies in Britain and Ireland, mainly women, solicited contributions for boxes they would send to the annual fair or bazaar organised by Maria Weston Chapman of the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society. The contributions, which included clothes, shoes, handkerchiefs, non-perishable foods, children's toys, drawings, paintings, books and pamphlets, were sold to raise money for the American Anti-Slavery Society, and indeed were its chief source of income. Starting off in private homes, the bazaar became a major public event, taking place in Boston's Faneuil Hall, raising $4,000 annually. To be sure, from a purely economic point of view it would have been more efficient if supporters had simply donated money. But, as a notice in the Liberator pointed out, the ‘pecuniary benefit derived from these sales’ was ‘but one of several reasons in their favor’. The fair was a remarkable space, run by women, where men and women both black and white and of different classes could mingle safely without censure. In addition, it was a celebration of international co-operation. Not only were the various items for sale visibly cosmopolitan in origin (a feature reinforced by the inventories published in the Liberator), they were often prized because they bore the tactile traces of their donors across the Atlantic (locks of hair, autographs, daguerreotypes and goods which were either homemade or bearing personalised mottoes). All this helped to define the antislavery movement as one that crossed borders, with the bazaar, as Chapman's own striking simile had it, a world in miniature: