Emancipating New York: The Politics of Slavery and Freedom, 1777-1827 (review)

For mainstream (read white) consciousness, both slavery in Revolutionary America and the Revolution's part in destroying slavery remain side-shows. Gellman's Emancipating New York ought to help change that level of awareness. Going beyond studies of New York slavery by White, Hodges, Foote, and Lepore, Gellman deals with the complexity, hesitation, contradictions, and great importance of slavery's destruction in its great northern bastion.¹

Gellman makes four big points about how slavery died in New York. First, it generated intense debate, sorting out slavery's friends and enemies. That alignment cut across all others. Favoring or opposing independence, a democratic republic, or strong government had nothing to do with a person's stance on slavery.

Second, New York slavery died slowly. When the state finally began gradual abolition in 1799, slavery was long-dead in Vermont and in Massachusetts. Slow abolition was underway in the rest of New England, and it was nearly done in Pennsylvania. Only New Jersey lagged further behind. Third, black New Yorkers took a major role in destroying slavery, though they often clashed with their white allies, most especially on the former slaves' place in the Republic.

Gellman's fourth point is his most original contribution, melding and freshening two older discussions about the revolution. One of them opened the political language of the era, treating American republicanism as both ideology and practice. Slavery figured in that language abstractly, but actual enslavement seemed peripheral, at least in historians' reconstructions. The other historians' discussion probed the experiences of all sorts of people, including slaves, as they remade their world and often themselves.

Gellman shows that the discourse of republican politics and the discourse and practice of abolition cannot be separated. When gradual abolition finally began in 1799, the problem ceased to be whether slavery in New York should end; the new problem was to determine what to do with the people in the state who had been slaves. Forcing them into exile was out of the question, even though racism abounded in white New York, and even anti-slavery politicians often favored it. But while the South hungered for more slaves to grow cotton, the real issues were the extent to which black New Yorkers could participate in the polity as citizens, and how the polity could protect them against would-be re-enslavers.

As Gellman shows, slavery ran through New York State's early republican history. When it finally ended, on July 4, 1827, the state-level discussion fed almost directly into abolitionism of another sort. Adopted New Yorker Alexander Hamilton opposed slavery as part of fostering American nationalism. Adopted New Yorker Frederick Douglass believed in Hamilton's project, despite his famous question of 1852, "What to the Slave is Your Fourth of July?" To him, as to many at the time, ending slavery nationwide, immediately, and with full equality was the only way for that project to become complete.

Gellman tells a story that links those two individuals and the questions that they posed in a web that comprised the words and the actions of many others. His prose is both sophisticated and accessible. He may well have written one of those rare first monographs that can attract readers inside and outside the academic world. Both his book and its subject deserve no less.