| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.4

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Nikki M. Taylor. Frontiers of Freedom: Cincinnati's Black Community, 1802–1868. (Ohio University Press Series on Law, Society, and Politics in the Midwest.) Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press. 2005. Pp. xvii, 315. Cloth $55.00, paper $24.95.

In recent years there has been increasing attention to the importance of the antebellum African American experience in the states that formed out of the Northwestern Territories. Nikki M. Taylor's book takes its place in this growing body of literature by providing a long overdue book-length study of Cincinnati's African American community, which numbered among the North's largest in the antebellum period that constitutes the heart of this account. Taylor rescues its remarkably rich history from a sometimes thin historical record, tracing the period from the dawn of the nineteenth century through the Civil War and its immediate aftermath. She focuses on "the process by which a transient population of former slaves developed into a self-conscious black community" (p. 2) whose center was not the church but the school. She details how African Americans "moved from alienation and vulnerability in the 1820s toward collective consciousness and, eventually, political self-respect and self-determination by the 1840s" (p. 2) in some of the most hostile conditions faced by any antebellum northern black community. Indeed, it is one of the manifestations of that racial climate—the riot of 1841—that Taylor identifies as the "watershed moment for this community" (p. 9). In its aftermath, Cincinnati's African Americans engaged in "a wave of institution-building" (p. 117) that "suggest[ed] that black Cincinnati had developed an articulation of what freedom was ... and [had] developed at least a provisional blueprint to achieve it" (p. 118).

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