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Book Review
| Richard S. Newman, The Transformation of American Abolitionism: Fighting Slavery in the Early Republic, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002. Pp. xii + 256. $45.00 cloth (ISBN 0-8078-2671-5); $18.95 paper (0-8078-4998-7).
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| Richard S. Newman's book traces American antislavery from the formation of the Pennsylvania Society for the Abolition of Slavery (PAS) in 1775 through the 1830s, the first decade of Garrisonian abolition. In the course of doing so, Newman analyzes the goals and means of both the PAS and the Garrisonians, finding in the transition from one group to another reflections of the broader change in American life from deferential politics to democratic mass movements. With democratization came changes in the constituencies of organized abolition as well as new mass action tactics and an emphasis on the immediate abolition of slavery. |
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Newman begins with three chapters about the PAS, the early Republic's foremost antislavery organization and the principle architect of Pennsylvania's pioneering gradual emancipation act in 1780. The PAS boasted prominent members and broad insider influence in the state and federal governments. "Pennsylvania abolitionists never doubted government's power to gradually destroy bondage" (24), Newman writes, and he chronicles their diligent efforts to stymie slavery through the petitions of elite men to government officials and their careful attention to any legal loophole or court case that could result in individual freedom or establishing precedents for liberty over slavery. Newman gives the PAS due credit for waging broad if not particularly aggressive petition campaigns on a host of slavery-related issues. But he also clearly regards their efforts as incomplete—their deferential tone while petitioning, their steadfast refusal to allow black membership, and their willingness to hold "back if the political risks were too high for the American nation" (58) mark them as old-fashioned elites with some priorities (especially the maintenance of the Union) above that of abolition. Dedicated to working within the political system to which they belonged as elite white men, the PAS comes across in Newman's interpretation as half-hearted. |
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Of particular interest to Law and History Review readers will be Newman's analysis of the PAS's activism in the federal and Pennsylvania court systems. PAS devoted very large percentages of their budget to legal activism, seeking stringent applications of the emancipatory elements of the state's gradual emancipation law and exploring loopholes in the U.S. Fugitive Slave Act of 1794. Newman's assertion that black activists helped to set this agenda by reporting cases to the PAS and by offering much of the supporting testimony during trials is especially intriguing; even though the PAS refused to admit black members, they both needed and responded to the black community of Philadelphia. |
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Newman's emphasis on the black role in establishing the PAS's legal agenda is part of his larger argument that black abolitionists played a critical part in the transformation of abolitionism in the early republic. For Newman, the transition from the PAS to Garrisonianism in the early 1830s is a change in both goals and tactics. Historians, he argues, have focussed on the change from the PAS's gradualism to William Lloyd Garrison's immediatist agenda. Newman, however, concentrates mostly on the new tactics that abolitionists developed in reaction to the spectacular growth of the American Colonization Society (ACS) during the early 1820s. Black abolitionists, he writes, developed these new means of vocalizing the abolitionist position in the decade before Garrison deployed them in the 1830s. When white abolitionists in the PAS proved either ineffectual or uninterested in fighting the ACS, African Americans were forced to find new means of resisting the deportation of free blacks. Denied a place in the PAS's power structure, "African Americans were forced to fight slavery in the public realm" (87), not the court house or back rooms of the legislature. As part of their public campaign against colonization, black abolitionists wrote essays, sermons, and pamphlets, started newspapers, developed emotional appeals about the cruelty of slavery, and embraced the growing national cultures of egalitarianism, democracy, and mass political mobilization. Newman's survey of black abolitionists' tactical innovations during the 1820s underlies his well-substantiated claim that, in essence, everything William Lloyd Garrison did in the 1830s he learned from talking with and observing the black activism of the previous decade. |
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The book's remaining chapters chronicle the rise of the New England Anti-Slavery Society and its adoption of the rhetorics and tactics of the earlier black abolitionists. In discreet chapters, Newman analyzes how the Boston-based abolitionists supplanted the more staid Philadelphians by accepting "broad concepts of social justice for all blacks" (129), adopting mass action strategies such as broadly based petition campaigns, and by sending out traveling agents to mobilize the entire population into antislavery societies. In an era of general democratization, Garrisonian abolitionists pushed the boundaries of egalitarianism and inclusiveness farther than most, with all sexes and races valued as fellow activists, but Newman argues persuasively that the radical abolitionists were part of those larger trends in American social mobilization. That abolitionists learned this from African American activists in the 1820s has significant implications for historians of abolitionism, anti-abolitionism, and perhaps other mass reform movements as well. |
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Readers might disagree with Newman's conception of his study as the "transformation" of American abolitionism. His treatment of the PAS as overly deferential, too concerned with the survival of the Union, and caught up in their recognition of the legal existence of slavery conveys an image of the Philadelphians that is so radically different from that of their black and white successors that "transformation" seems inaccurate. What he has portrayed, it seems, is not one thing that has transformed itself but rather two distinct mind-sets, one replacing the other. During the brief period of overlap when the two groups coexisted side by side, relations were strained at best. This undercuts some of Newman's arguments for the necessity of studying abolitionism's earliest years, but it does not affect the overall value of his book. |
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Richard Newman's study significantly furthers our understanding of the key roles African Americans played in undermining the slave system. By placing them at the chronological crux of his study, when abolitionism changed from a white, elite-based, and gradualist group to an interracial mass movement, Newman has effectively proven that the Garrisonians depended on black activists for new antislavery tactics and thinking as well as money, members, and insight. |
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| Michael D. Pierson
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| University of Massachusetts, Lowell |
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