Freedom by Degrees: Emancipation in Pennsylvania and Its AftermathOxford University Press, 1991 M01 17 - 272 pages 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. |
Other editions - View all
Common terms and phrases
abolition of slavery abolitionism abolitionist African-Americans Africans American Anglican Anthony Benezet antislavery artisans Benjamin bill bondage born bound labor Census century Chester County church city's Colonial Committee cottagers court decade Delaware counties delphia died early economic emancipation Episcopalians families farmers Forging Freedom Franklin free blacks free their slaves freed slaves gradual abolition act households Ibid immigrants indentured servants Jersey John Keithian Lancaster Lancaster County large number lived manumissions manumitted Maryland masters merchants Monthly Meeting moral Nash Negro non-Quaker Northern Liberties number of slaves owners Papers Penn Pennsylvania Abolition Society percent Phila Philadelphia slaves Philadelphia Yearly Meeting PMHB Presbyterians purchased Quakers and Slavery Reel reformers registered release their slaves Revolution Revolutionary runaway rural Pennsylvania servitude slave population slave trade slaveholders slaveowners Society of Friends Soderlund sold Southeby Table tax assessment list tax lists Thomas tion U.S. Bureau urban widow William woman Woolman
Popular passages
Page xiii - It having pleased the Creator of the world, to make of one flesh all the children of men — it becomes them to consult and promote each other's happiness, as members of the same family, however diversified they may be, by colour, situation, religion, or different states of society.
Page x - People? Why increase the Sons of Africa, by Planting them in America, where we have so fair an Opportunity, by excluding all Blacks and Tawneys, of increasing the lovely White and Red?