Freedom By Degrees: Emancipation In Pennsylvania And Its Aftermath
by Gary B. Nash /
1991 / English / PDF
16.4 MB Download
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.
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.