Slavery & “Free” Soil
As the semester soon begins, I’ve read two new releases as my last two titles for summer. Both are out with the University of Pennsylvania Press, and both make vital contributions to the history of slavery.
The first is Belonging: An Intimate History of Slavery and Belonging in Early New England. It looks at the long history of enslavement in Boston in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and its sudden and rapid collapse in the 1770s. Built on exhaustive research, Professor Gloria Whiting argues that family and kinship were central features of enslaved people’s lives, and centrally important to the end of slavery in Massachusetts. Each of the six chapters are built around one family, and she shows the persistant and frequently successful efforts of enslaved people to form families that were recognized by the colony and later state. Many of the figures in the chapters are exemplary cases including Dorcas, the first Black woman to gain full membership in the church, the Bedunahs, a rare instance of interracial marriage, and Mark, Phillis, and Phoebe, who were at the center of the only murder trial in which enslaved people killed their enslavers. It is a wide-ranging book filled with new insights. Reading it right before the start of the semester was great timing because it will allow me to update what I say about colonial New England, most especially concerning slavery in the 1641 Body of Liberties. Equally important is the concluding chapter which fundamentally recasts how we understand the end of slavery in the state, and in turn rethinks the relationship between abolition and the movement for U.S. Independence. This argument was previewed in a blockbuster article in Slavery & Abolition and it gets full treatment in the book.
The second is The Rising Generation: Gradual Abolition, Black Legal Culture, and the Making of National Freedom. A study of slavery and abolition in New York, Professor Sarah L.H. Gronningsater has unearthed a wealth of new information about slavery’s demise in this critical state with implications for the wider nation. Not focused alone on the city, Gronningsater puts ordinary people living in New York, whom she calls the “children of gradual abolition” at the center of the story. If Whiting ends her story in the 1770s, Gronningsater begins there, showing the early-modern foundations of the antislavery movement, which helps explain why gradual emancipation laws took the shape they did. Contests over emancipation in the ninteenth century, she shows convincingly, were really extensions debates rooted in the eighteenth century. She then tracks the long sorting out of what a post-emanicipation New York would look like with chapters on the schools, voting, petitioning, politics, and finally reconstruction. While the book teams with new insights and important contributions, the chapter on Reconstruction is perhaps its most revelatory, returning attention to Reconstruction in the North and to figures like Senator Roscoe Conkling—neither of which are normally part of the conversation. This chapter shows the the children of gradual abolition used their experiences to shape the course of the national push to end slavery and create a system of equal citizenship.
Both books are important in their own right, and together they indicate that the work on northern slavery and abolition is going to continue for some years to come. It will provide an important basis for a new generation of works (by scholars like Helen Kenniford, Corey James Young, Grant Stanton, or Duangkamol Tantirungkij to name only a few) and I know I’ll continue to follow these works with great interest.
