Customer Reviews

In Hope of Liberty: Culture, Community and Protest Among Northern Free Blacks, 1700-1860

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One of the most important developments in the historiography of the antebellum abolitionist crusade is the emphasis on the role of free blacks in the North as shapers of the national agenda. We have long known of Frederick Douglass's role in this regard, of course, but in the 1960s historians began to appreciate in much greater depth the role of northern African Americans in the antislavery struggle. Leon F. Litwack's "North of Slavery: The Negro in the Free States, 1790-1860" (University of Chicago Press, 1961) and Benjamin Quarles's "The Negro in the American Revolution" (University of North Carolina Press, 1961) were both undeniably significant benchmarks in this historiography. Historians James Oliver Horton and Lois E. Horton now provide a much richer perspective and make clear the effort was much broader than most have appreciated. The Hortons integrate a broad body of secondary literature on free blacks in the antebellum North with their own research into an elegantly crafted narrative.

The Hortons take as their thesis that northern African Americans not in bondage embraced the ideals of the American Revolution and the early republic for "liberty" and "freedom." As disinherited sons and daughters of the Revolution their constant critique served to remind and press the status quo of white America throughout the antebellum period. As the Hortons write, "American ideals were not bounded by color, and the desire for liberty and equality was strongest to those whom they were denied" (p. xii). Taking a generally chronological approach they trace the cause of freedom and liberty among free northern African Americans from the Revolution to the4 civil War. Along the way they tell the story of Crispis Attucks, an African American killed in the Boston Massacre, those who fought in the Revolution, and those who embrace the antislavery crusade and sought both legal and extralegal means to end its hold over human beings in the United States. Much of this is now familiar terrain, but the Hortons bring a depth to the story not present elsewhere and that, coupled with an elegance of style makes this an excellent reading experience.

More significant is the authors' portrait of the lives of north free blacks. To a degree not seen previously, the Hortons explore the themes of the new social history--especially issues of race, ethnicity, class, and gender--in relation to the lives of this community. To a very real extent they depict the world the free African Americans made in a nation increasingly hostile to their objectives of freedom and liberty in the first half of the nineteenth century. Issues of family lifestyles, kinship, work relations, political power both in the larger society and within the black community, religion, social organizations, the question of re-colonization of Africa, and the abolitionist cause are the meat of this book.

As a unit this is an exceptionally valuable work. I recommend it as a highly successful discussion of one significant aspect of the reform movements of antebellum American society.