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Reviews of Books
Joshua R. Greenberg, Bridgewater State College
| Emancipating New York: The Politics of Slavery and Freedom, 1777–1827. By David N. Gellman. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2006. 311 pages. $45.00 (cloth).
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African slavery in New York began when New Amsterdam was one of many points in the Dutch Atlantic triangle trade; David N. Gellman writes a compelling study of the process of ending slavery in New York that involved a different type of triangulation. Rather than examining the social experiences of African Americans during the emancipation era, the book painstakingly deconstructs the public, political, and intellectual conversation on race, slavery, and citizenship in early republican New York to explain how and why the institution ended. |
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By the late eighteenth century, New Yorkers owned more slaves and had a higher percentage of slaves than citizens in any other Northern state. This unique entrenchment of the institution blunted efforts to end bondage in the Empire State during the American War of Independence. It was not revolutionary ideology that precipitated the passage of New York's 1799 gradual emancipation legislation, Gellman argues, but rather two decades of local legislative and public wrangling within the context of wider conversations about citizenship and political economy in the early Republic. |
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Gellman organizes the book into three uneven parts that emphasize the complex discursive deliberation between the failed emancipation bill of 1785 and the successful 1799 law. Chapters 1 and 2 quickly examine the colonial period, noting that slavery's broad roots in New York ensured that before independence "the institution was not subjected to a sustained, public critique" (25). The Revolution certainly affected the individual lives of slaves and owners as both tried to use the upheaval of war to their advantage. Runaways seeking the protection of the British crossed paths with patriots relocating with their slaves into the Hudson Valley. The failure to address slavery's fate in the 1777 state constitution, however, only promised more public debate in the early Republic. |
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In chapters 3 through 8, Gellman slowly develops the book's central narrative of the persistence that opponents of slavery demonstrated in their attempts to use any public debate in the 1780s and 1790s to keep the issue of emancipation center stage. Because antislavery activists sought to press public opinion to gradually end slavery on a wide range of fronts, every major issue of the era, from the passage of the Constitution to Jay's Treaty, was argued in reference to emancipation and racial bondage. Gellman most successfully explores this triangulation in chapter 5 ("Pirates, Sugar, Debtors, and Federalists: The Paradoxes of Antislavery Political Economy"), where, for example, an evaluation of whether imprisonment for debt could coincide with postrevolutionary notions of social discipline was placed in starker relief through its comparison with African American bondage. Similarly, the outcry over captive Americans enslaved in Algeria furnished an opportunity for a direct comparison with New York's system of slavery. By the late 1790s, constant pressure by antislavery activists showed that even bitter partisan contests, such as that over the 1798 Alien and Sedition Acts, foretold the end of slavery in New York; both parties used the moment to distance themselves from proslavery Southern interpretations of the Constitution. A year later, when a gradual emancipation bill arrived in the legislature, the issue at hand was not if slavery would end but whether state or local governments would be financially responsible for the newly freed population. |
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