Book Review

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Book Review | The Journal of American History, 86.1 | The History Cooperative

Disowning Slavery: Gradual Emancipation and "Race" in New England, 1780-1860. By Joanne Pope Melish. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998. xx, 296 pp. $35.00, isbn 0-8014-3413-0.)

This fascinating book tells the story of the end of slavery in New England. Using town records, court records, planters' diaries, farmers' almanacs, popular broadsides, and the writings of black and white abolitionists, Joanne Pope Melish has traced the process by which an institution that was once central to the lives of many New Englanders was abolished and replaced with a "republican" social order whose promises of equality reached only as far as the emerging color line between white and black. 1

Though their aggregate numbers were small, Melish argues, slaves were important members of the "families" of New England slaveholders—assigned a distinct though subservient role within the set of patriarchal metaphors through which New Englanders organized their society. Emancipation came slowly to many: the gradual emancipation laws passed after the Revolution were often very gradual, and erstwhile slaveholders continued, through a variety of legal and extralegal tricks, to control their former slaves' labor and keep a lid on their ambitions. . . .

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