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.
African American resources at Lancaster County Historical Society
Contents
Contents : Colonial Pennsylvania --- Anti-slavery Pioneers --- The Abolition Act of 1780 --- Work of the Abolition Society --- The Free Negroes Organize --- The American Colonization Society ---Garrisonian Abolitionism --- The American Anti-Slavery Society --- Negro Disfranchisement --- The Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society--- The Burning of Pennsylvania Hall --- Conflict Within Abolitionism --- The Underground Railroad --- Growth of the Negro Community --- Civil War and Reconstruction --- The Struggle For Equal Rights --- Suffrage Restored --- The School Question --- Cultural Progress