Book Review

Canada and the United States

Richard S. Newman's book makes a major contribution to our understanding of the first fifty-six years of American abolitionism, from the refounding of the Pennsylvania Abolition Society (PAS) in 1784 (after an initial brief start in 1775) to the disastrous fragmentation of a national movement in 1839–1840. Newman provides new details on the mundane tactics and surprising legal achievements of the "elite" PAS; on the crucial intermediary role of free black abolitionists, especially in the 1820s when their radical attacks on the American Colonization Society (ACS) and northern racism prepared the way for the Garrisonians and other "immediatists"; and also on the continuing involvement of blacks and women in the abolitionist movement of the 1830s.	1
Unfortunately, Newman has little appreciation of the religious foundations of both British and American abolitionism, and he totally ignores the continuing and crucial interaction of British and American reformers from the time of Anthony Benezet and William Dillwyn to James Cropper and the influence of the British Agency Committee (never mentioned) on the creation of the American "agency system," to which he devotes an entire chapter. Indeed, the book never mentions Elizabeth Heyrick's revolutionary work Immediate, Not Gradual Emancipation, published in England in 1824, even though Benjamin Lundy reprinted it in his Genius of Universal Emancipation long before Garrison became a coeditor. Newman says little or nothing about abolitionists in Connecticut, New York, or the Upper South, or about such early radical figures David Barrow, George Bourne, and Thomas Branagan.	2
The book is essentially an in-depth study of early pragmatic abolitionism in Pennsylvania and then of the later, more radical, romantic, and democratic movement based in Massachusetts. One can certainly argue that this limited focus serves to highlight an enormous cultural and ideological "transformation," but some definition of the book's exclusionary scope should have been provided in Newman's preface.	3
In the first endnote to the first chapter, Newman offers an indispensable definition of a term that is much overused in modern historiography: "elite." For Newman, it "signifies a tactical style and outlook, not the aristocratic pretensions of the PAS members."	4
If "elite" pertains only to "tactical style and outlook," then we can use the term to include the many artisans who belonged to the PAS and dissociate the word from such wealthy free black pioneer abolitionists as James Forten and the Purvis family, as well as from the extraordinarily rich and upper-class abolitionists Arthur and Lewis Tappan, Gerrit Smith, Wendell Phillips, and Ellis Loring. Freeman never faces up to this issue, or to the fact that it was men like Forten, the Tappans, and Gerrit Smith who made the radical "second wave" of American abolitionism possible. Even figures like Theodore Weld and Amos Phelps, a Yale graduate and one of Freeman's heroes, would be considered "elite" by many historians. And one can argue that the abolitionist movement enabled a poor printer like Garrison to become a member of the "elite."	5
But Freeman should be applauded for his emphasis on tactics. He shows that if the older PAS was deferential toward the Constitution and the republican political and legal system, its many attorneys were tireless, dedicated, and often successful in their attempts to free individual slaves, protect free blacks, and enforce laws against the slave trade. The methods and hard labor of the PASC remind one of the early successes of the much later National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).	. . .