Includes bibliographical references (p. 207-236) and index.
African American resources at Lancaster County Historical Society.
Summary
During the revolutionary era, in the midst of the struggle for liberty from Great Britain, Americans up and down the Atlantic seaboard confronted the injustice of holding slaves. Lawmakers debated abolition, masters considered freeing their slaves, and slaves emancipated themselves by running away. But by 1800, of states south of New England, only Pennsylvania had extricated itself from slavery, the triumph, historians have argued, of Quaker moralism and the philosophy of natural rights. With exhaustive research of individual acts of freedom, slave escapes, legislative action, and anti-slavery appeals, Nash and Soderlund penetrate beneath such broad generalizations and find a more complicated process at work. Defiant runaway slaves joined Quaker abolitionists like Anthony Benezet and members of the Pennsylvania Abolition Society to end slavery and slave owners shrewdly calculated how to remove themselves from a morally bankrupt institution without suffering financial loss by freeing slaves as indentured servants, laborers, and cottagers.
"As the confederates advance into Pennsylvania during the Gettysburg Campaign, a group of Franklin & Marshall College students follow Robert Nevin, their former professor of Greek, into the army, forming Lancaster County’s only Civil War artillery battery – Independent Battery I, Pennsylvania Light Artillery. Join the men of Independent Battery I as they await the enemy at the Susquehanna River, and at the threatened state capital of Harrisburg. Learn of the experiences in Philadelphia where they expect to quell draft riots, and follow them as they serve at Harpers Ferry in ‘ironclad’ railcars on the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad and build fortifications on Maryland Heights. March with the men as they are sent to the defenses of Washington DC. Join them as they experience Confederate General Jubal Early’s attack on the city, debate the issues of the 1864 elections, and witness Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address, as well as the Grand Review.†[from the publisher]
