Discourse, Politics, and Ending Slavery in New York

For David Gellman the expansion of human rights requires "liberating discourses" before it can be effected (p. 223). In analyzing discourses concerning slavery in early national New York, Gellman essays to explain how New York, the northern state with the largest number of slaves, decided in 1799 in favor of a gradual abolition law. The approach locates the book within the "newest political history," which "turns to forms of culture . . . in search of political change."¹ Well argued and insightful, Emancipating New York nevertheless demonstrates the limits of discursive analysis to explain a phenomenon such as abolition, since slavery was an economic system at least as much as a cultural one.

In focusing on the power of ideas to change history, Gellman follows in the footsteps of Arthur Zilversmit, whose 1967 survey of emancipation in the northern states, The First Emancipation: The Abolition of Slavery in the North, remains the only general book on the subject. Zilversmit's narrative featured "abolitionists" specifically (most of them Quakers) and Enlightenment and American Revolutionary ideology more generally as heroes battling the evil institution of slavery and the self-interest of slaveholders. These protagonists triumphed in 1804 with the passage of New Jersey's gradual abolition act, which left only the states from Delaware southward committed to slavery's preservation.

The story that emerged from works by subsequent writers who examined the history of emancipation in individual states did not so clearly end in victory for the causes of right. Yes, northern white leaders put slavery on the road to extermination, but they did so cautiously, without compensation to slaves, and absent any significant effort to create an egalitarian, biracial, let alone nonracial, society. Moreover, in the accounts of Gary Nash and Jean Soderlund (Freedom By Degrees: Emancipation in Pennsylvania and its Aftermath [1991]), Shane White (Somewhat More Independent: The End of Slavery in New York City [1991]), and Joanne Pope Melish (Disowning Slavery: Gradual Emancipation and "Race" in New England, 1780–1860 [1998]), whites also did all they could to extract labor from black people even as slavery was ending. These books questioned the radical nature of the American Revolution by arguing that emancipation in the North, something apparently revolutionary as well as Revolutionary, actually did little to change social relations or whites' habits of mind.

Emancipating New York challenges the rather negative assessment of northern emancipation that emerged in the 1990s. For one thing, the book restores credit and credibility to the New York Manumission Society (NYMS), an organization Shane White concluded had little effect on emancipation and operated more to reform than to end slavery. The book also restores credit to the power of the American Revolution to reshape society by challenging slavery. As Gellman puts it, "because the Revolution fundamentally altered the political, economic, cultural, and even moral climate of New York, the seeds of an enduring antislavery discourse were now embedded in that foundation" (p. 27). At the same time, however, Gellman understands the complexity of the Revolutionary heritage and that the "delayed beginning of gradual abolition in New York precludes ascribing emancipation to Revolutionary fervor or the inevitable realization of Revolutionary ideals" (p. 5).

Emancipating New York also challenges the view recently advanced by Richard S. Newman in The Transformation of American Abolitionism: Fighting Slavery in the Early Republic (2002) that early national abolitionism was the province mainly of elites. A major thread of Gellman's argument is that "support for statewide abolition was generated publicly" (p. 4). Discourse, primarily in the form of newspaper articles, consequently becomes central to the story. Gellman's analysis of printed essays, stories, and poems concerning slavery and black people, including works authored by African Americans, forms the book's core. Since "public opinion . . . was the cornerstone of politics in a republican society," analysis of these sources is meant to reveal the "politics of slavery and freedom" of the book's subtitle (pp. 6–7). In key...