Republicans of Color

The genesis of the first movement abolitionist reform project stemmed from a central dilemma bequeathed to abolitionists by the American Revolution. The same natural rights Revolutionary ideology that aided the first abolition movement also presented slaves as the very antithesis of the independent, virtuous citizenry necessary to uphold representative government and maintain the American experiment in republicanism, making emancipation a problematic process. Out of their quest to solve this paradox, abolition society members and their free black collaborators constructed a reform agenda of societal environmentalism. Based on free black socioeconomic uplift and the application of the early republic's educational mores to free blacks, societal environmentalism aimed to inculcate republican virtue in former slaves. Black education and citizenship would help to defeat white prejudice and convince the public that African Americans were worthy of emancipation. Through these reformist initiatives, first movement abolitionists sought to prove black capacity for freedom by integrating African Americans into the American republic and making them virtuous and independent citizens, fully capable of productively exercising their liberty within greater white society.

“A Well Grounded Hope”

First movement abolitionists labeled racial prejudice as at once a forbidding foe to social progress and at the same time the relic of a pre-enlightened era. Predicated on an enlightenment-inspired idealism that viewed white prejudice towards blacks as conquerable, the abolition societies and their black abolitionist partners nevertheless identified this prejudice as an imposing hurdle to emancipation. First movement abolitionists committed themselves to sweeping away the cobwebs of racial prejudice blocking the white public from perceiving black Americans’ equal humanity and their capacity for freedom. For first movement abolitionists, the cultivation of black citizenship and the vanquishing of white prejudice were interwoven goals essential to ending slavery. This chapter argues that rrecovering the mindset of first movement abolitionists during the post-Revolutionary and early national eras is essential to understanding why these activists instituted an optimistic agenda for emancipation through African American incorporation and the defeat of white prejudice.

A Prudent Alternative or a Dangerous Diversion?

The emergence of colonization as a potential antislavery tool drove a wedge between competing factions among abolition societies. a long and at times divisive debate that fractured the abolition societies and signaled the rising influence of colonization among white reformers as an answer to ending slavery. With their claims to American citizenship under direct threat from the ideology of the American Colonization Society, black abolitionists more readily distinguished colonization from emancipation. People of color and the abolition societies of the Mid-Atlantic had jointly discredited the ACS soon after its founding. But by the beginning of the 1830s, it was black activists who had become the foremost champions of first movement abolitionist values, advancing the cause of combating slavery by overturning white prejudice and improving the condition of African Americans within the United States.

A Movement Forgotten

While they came up short in achieving equality for former slaves, the first movement abolitionist program of black uplift and its commitment to African American rights and incorporation helped nurture a generation of reformers who would continue this racially redemptive quest. If they could not vanquish white prejudice, first movement abolitionists understood that eradicating the inequities of slavery required more than ending the institution of human bondage alone. Just as importantly, completing abolition meant reconstructing the society that made slavery a viable institution in the first place; a lesson well taken in the Post-Civil War South. The most enduring legacy of America’s first abolition movement was its abiding faith that a world free from black oppression and racial inequality was possible. It was this audacity to imagine such a society that inspired not only first movement abolitionists, but likeminded exponents of black equality and racial justice that would follow in their footsteps—from immediate abolitionists in the antebellum period to Radical Republicans during Reconstruction, and beyond.

The “Just Right of Freedom”

By reconstructing the individual cases recorded in the minutes of the acting and standing committees of the Pennsylvania Abolition Society and New York Manumission Society, this chapter brings to life a pitched contest pitting slaveholders and dealers on the one side and black Northerners and the abolition societies on the other. Out of this contest arose a campaign dedicated at its core to the conviction that persons of African descent had rights worthy of respect. At the very heart of first movement abolitionism, from a street level view of this activism, enforcing emancipation fueled a cause premised on the progressive gains of black Northerners as rights-bearing individuals. in their many acts defending the sanctity of black freedom, first movement abolitionists staked a claim for people of color as incorporated members of the localities and states in which they resided. Enforcing emancipation necessarily entailed asserting the fundamental rights of citizenship for liberated blacks living in the Mid-Atlantic region.

“Unconquerable Prejudice” and “Alien Enemies”

The rise of the American Colonization Society represented a sweeping shift from the reform program of the first abolition movement. For first movement abolitionists, slavery created a corrupted societal environment that degraded blacks and blinded whites to the inherent equality of African Americans. The first movement abolitionist agenda was premised on overturning this corrupted environment, caused by racial slavery. According to colonzationists, however, the problem facing antislavery advocates was not slavery itself but race. As colonizationists saw it, an unalterable racial divide between white and black Americans created a fixed societal environment of black inferiority in which prejudice was unconquerable. The reality of an unchangeable white prejudice made freedom a mockery in the North and an impossibility in the South, as long as African Americans remained within the nation's borders. Colonizationists turned their backs on the reformers who came before them by arguing that slavery could not be abolished through black incorporation. Unless those of African descent were removed from American society, colonizationists insisted, emancipation constituted a delusional hope.

The Making of a Movement

An admixture of free black community leaders, elite white Americans, Quaker activists, and unfree black laborers would seem to make for a strange set of allies and a disjointed reform movement. Yet this mix of historical actors firmly committed themselves to the idea of antislavery progress; or the belief that, through the agency of reformers, the trajectory of post-Revolutionary and early national America would lead toward emancipation, black uplift, and the dissolution of white prejudice. While first movement abolitionists coalesced around the idea of antislavery progress, the many obstacles they faced informed the shape and scope of their activism. For one, slavery in the Mid-Atlantic was based on racial oppression and longstanding white prejudice toward people of color, facts that would continually haunt the efforts of first movement abolitionists. Second, the American Revolution, which influenced and gave broader purchase to opposing slavery, also made abolitionism problematic. Thus, if the idea of antislavery progress informed the ethos of first movement abolitionists, the roadblocks detailed in this chapter to emancipation galvanized them into action.

Introduction

What this book terms first movement abolitionism was composed of an ideological and strategic coalition of black and white activists with three shared ideals for abolishing slavery: a commitment to enforcing Northern emancipation statutes and enlarging the elemental rights of people of color through pragmatic, on the ground activism; the belief that free blacks were entitled to the rights of American citizenship and could become virtuous members of the body politic; and the expectation that through black uplift and incorporation, and a campaign of public persuasion, white prejudice could be defeated and the arguments of slavery’s defenders about the incapacity of people of African descent for freedom proved wrong. This book is the first to fully recover America’s first abolition movement as a movement in its own right—tracing its origins, restoring the full breadth of its program and agenda, and accounting for its eventual fall and relative historical marginalization.