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.
C. Peter Ripley, editor ; co-editors, Roy E. Finkenbine, Michael F. Hembree, Donald Yacovone.
ISBN
0807820725 (cloth : alk. paper)
0807844047 (pbk. : alk. paper)
Place of Publication
Chapel Hill
Publisher
University of North Carolina Press,
Date of Publication
c1993.
Physical Description
xxiv, 306 p. : ill. ; 25 cm.
Notes
Chapter 37 is titled: William Whipper's letters.
Includes bibliographical references (p. [279]-289) and index.
Contents
The rise of black abolitionism : the colonization controversy; the growth of black abolitionism; the rise of immediatism; moral reform; prejudice; two abolitionisms -- African Americans and the antislavery movement : blacks as advocates; slave narratives; black women abolitionists; antislavery and the black community; problems in the movement -- Black independence : a new direction; the African American press; in the common defense; antislavery politics; black antislavery tactics; by all just and necessary means -- Black abolitionists and the national crisis : the slave power; the fugitive slave law; black emigration; black nationality; blacks and John Brown -- Civil war : debating the war; the emancipation proclamation; blacks and Lincoln; the black military experience; the movement goes south; reconstruction.
