Unsettling the History of Slavery and Freedom

In the spring of 1968 the Organization of American Historians' president Thomas A. Bailey decried African American claims for historical recognition as a "pressure group history" that called for historians to neglect the achievements of "significant white men . . . in the interests of social harmony." Historical scholarship focused on "less significant black men," he worried, might result in "hard backed Negro histories of the United States, with white man's achievements relegated to subsidiary treatment."¹

That day has long come, and one repeat offender when it comes to writing such works has been Steven Hahn, the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning "A Nation under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration (2003). Yet, as Hahn notes in his provocative new book The Political Worlds of Slavery and Freedom, the proliferation of new scholarship on African Americans in recent decades has not always managed to "unsettle well-entrenched frameworks of analysis and ways of seeing the past" (p. x). Historians now know far more about African American history and politics than ever before, yet they often set the messy history of this singularly mobile, oppositional, and oppressed group within a master narrative of American history that dates back to Bailey's day—if not earlier.

A study of the "political worlds of both history and history making," Hahn's new book originated as a lecture series at Harvard and does not aspire to nor achieve the depth or breadth of A Nation under Our Feet. His Pulitzer Prize-winner presented a simultaneously sweeping and detailed history of the black political networks that took shape during slavery and also documented how such networks continued to shape African American politics during Reconstruction and beyond. The Political Worlds of Slavery and Freedom, by contrast, is a slender volume made up of three thought-provoking essays that challenge a number of conventional assumptions about African American history, without ever presenting any fully worked-out alternative. An immensely engaging book all the same, this work will leave readers rethinking the chronology and spatial logic of African American history in ways that also raise new questions about American history writ large.

Hahn's first essay, "Slaves at Large," begins by asking: was the Civil War really a sectional crisis? His answer revisits the status of African Americans in the antebellum-era North to argue that slavery was "a national rather than sectional" institution (p. 13). Although now known as "the first emancipation," the gradual emancipation of slavery in the post-Revolutionary Northern states left most blacks in the region far from free. The emancipation statutes that passed in Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New York, and New Jersey between 1780 and 1804 freed only the children of the enslaved; and it required them to first pay for themselves by working for their masters until well into their adult years. (The age at which these young men and women achieved emancipation varied by state, ranging from twenty-one to twenty-eight.) Trapped in an "extended process of emancipation," which slave owners did not always honor, some African Americans remained enslaved well into the nineteenth-century (p. 8). Moreover, the freedoms of freeborn and manumitted blacks were not particularly secure. The North teemed with both slave catchers and fugitive slaves, and free blacks could and did end up in the hands of any white who claimed them as fugitive slaves.

Indeed, fugitive and free alike, African Americans throughout the region had so few rights that they might well be regarded as maroons, Hahn contends, likening Northern free blacks to the bands of slave runaways who hid out for generations in remote settlements on the outskirts of plantation societies across the Americas. Although far more common in the Caribbean, where white settlers were comparatively scarce, small groups of maroons also existed in North America, especially in the swamps and backwoods of the Carolinas, Georgia, and Florida. The histories of such communities, while still largely unwritten, make Hahn...