Standard bearers of liberty and equality: Reinterpreting the origins of American abolitionism
Item
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Title
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Standard bearers of liberty and equality: Reinterpreting the origins of American abolitionism
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Identifier
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d_2009_2013:b1c5f7c3e56f:11813
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identifier
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12429
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Creator
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Polgar, Paul J.,
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Contributor
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James Oakes
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Date
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2013
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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American history | Black history | antislavery | early american | emancipation | race | reform | slavery
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Abstract
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America's first abolitionists sought a rights revolution for a people who for centuries had been viewed as little more than chattel objects. But the story of the sweeping challenge these reformers posed to slavery and black inequality remains untold. A generation of scholarship on the first emancipation has demonstrated the gradual and incomplete nature of African American liberation in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century North. In turn, historians have interpreted both gradual emancipation and those activists who advocated for it as inherently conservative. Between tenacious slaveholder resistance to their slaves' liberty and white skepticism about the merits of black freedom, abolitionists faced daunting obstacles to ending slavery in Post-Revolutionary America. Yet it was these very obstacles that generated the early national abolition societies' racially progressive approach to reform. By seeking to obtain and enforce antislavery laws, guard and expand the rights of illegally enslaved and free blacks, uproot white prejudice, and overturn racial inequality through making African Americans virtuous citizens of the new republic, antislavery activists met the formidable barriers to emancipation with a cohesive vision of black freedom and equality.;Early national abolitionism was designed to vanquish slavery through the joint enlightenment of black and white Americans. As gradual abolition laws and the implementation of black education and civic cultivation gave time for former slaves to be fitted into republican citizens, early national antislavery activists hoped to persuade a prejudiced white public to extend the egalitarian promises of Revolutionary ideology to the nation's African Americans. But by the end of the War of 1812, these reformers discovered that prejudice was hardening and the problem of slavery was becoming overshadowed by the problem of race.;Nothing embodied this shift more fully than the founding of the American Colonization Society. Colonizationists viewed white prejudice as unconquerable and therefore the incorporation of free blacks into the body politic as an impossibility. When immediate abolitionists emerged they linked gradualism with colonization and labeled both reactionary and exclusionist, thus erasing the racially progressive origins of gradual abolitionism that this dissertation aims to recapture.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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2009_2013.csv
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degree
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Ph.D.
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Program
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History
