| Book Reviews | The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, 132.1

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| Book Reviews | The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, 132.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Reviews

But One Race: The Life of Robert Purvis. By Margaret Hope Bacon. (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007. xi, 279 pp. Ancestral chart, notes, bibliography, index. $35.)

With emancipation scholars looking north (New York) and south (Haiti) of abolitionist Pennsylvania, Margaret Hope Bacon's wonderful biography of Robert Purvis is most welcome. One of the leading, though underrated, reformers of the nineteenth-century, Purvis (1810–98) dedicated his long life to achieving black equality. Though born free in South Carolina to an English father and a mixed-race mother, he remained in Pennsylvania for nearly seven decades after moving there as a teenager in the 1820s. Despite the fact that the Quaker state's gradual abolition law had existed nearly as long as American independence, the meaning of emancipation remained a hotly debated issue. As Bacon shows in a fast-paced and enjoyable narrative, Purvis was a consistent voice of black freedom, assuming the mantle of protest established by the postrevolutionary generation of African American leaders that included his father-in-law, the famed sailmaker James Forten. In short, this is no mere biography of a neglected reformer but a study of northern postemancipation society leading up to the Civil War era. It should not be overlooked.

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