Antislavery and Abolition in Philadelphia: Emancipation and the Long Struggle for Racial Justice in the City of Brotherly Love ed. by Richard Newman and James Mueller (review)

Inspired by last decade’s public controversy over how Independence National Historical Park should commemorate the slaves who labored in George Washington’s President’s House, this volume explicates Philadelphia’s complicated relationship to slavery and antislavery. Coeditors Richard Newman and James Mueller have collected nine intersecting essays that address an impressive range of key themes in the city’s antislavery history from the colonial era through the Civil War.

The editors suggest that Philadelphia deserves particular attention because of its confluence of antislavery Quakerism, sizable and politically mobilized free black community, and location so close to the border of slavery and freedom. While some conclusions will be familiar to those who have read the authors’ larger works (for example, Newman’s Transformation of American Abolitionism or David Waldstreicher’s Runaway America), this collection offers a scholarly panoply that mirrors the diversity of the antislavery community depicted in the book. One omission, however, is closer attention to antebellum political conflict and the ways white and black Philadelphians responded to the partisan politicization of antislavery in the Liberty, Free Soil, and Republican Parties.

In this book’s first essay, Ira Berlin outlines the histories of slavery’s establishment and collapse in Philadelphia and the emergence of free back institutions to contest racial inequality in Pennsylvania and beyond. Here specialists will find little that is surprising, but the elegant essay helps frame the remainder of the volume and will be appreciated by readers unacquainted with slavery’s place in Philadelphia’s history.

Waldstreicher then traces the origins of Philadelphia’s groundbreaking antislavery community far past the revolutionary generation and the city’s favorite protean hero, Benjamin Franklin. He identifies eighteenth-century Quaker dissidents whose activism made Philadelphia a wellspring for radical antislavery thought that preceded Garrisonian immediatism by decades. By way of contrast, Waldstreicher demonstrates (exposes?) Franklin to have been cautious and compromising on the slavery issue. Franklin’s public tepidity, or silence, calibrated to offend as few as possible, proved good business and good politics in eighteenth-century Philadelphia but hardly support his abolitionist reputation. I would like to suggest that the Franklin Waldstreicher shows us might also be seen as a founding generation analog to the moderate, compromising politics that weakly antislavery politicians like Edward Everett or Daniel Webster practiced in the 1840s and 1850s.

Echoing Waldstreicher’s emphasis on pre-antebellum antislavery radicalism, W. Caleb McDaniel identifies a consistent trend of “antislavery cosmopolitanism” that unites the histories of Revolutionary and antebellum abolitionism (151). Antislavery Philadelphians in both generations, McDaniel explains, imagined themselves as part of a broader transnational community and then used their shared participation in international networks to help them forge stronger links with abolitionists in other regions of the United States. Likewise attentive to Philadelphians’ involvement in global conflicts over slavery’s future, Heather Nathans integrates theatrical, social, and political history to highlight how depictions of race and slavery on the Philadelphia stage responded to international political developments and news of distant slave resistance. It remains unclear in this essay, though, whether Philadelphia provides a unique context or a case study of phenomena that transpired similarly in theaters across the urban North.

Several of this volume’s chapters shed light on the city’s extraordinary free black activism. Julie Winch provides a nuanced overview of the Philadelphia free black community’s emergence in the Revolutionary Era and maturation through the Civil War. She explicates how the community’s rank and file interacted with black elites like James Forten, Absalom Jones, and Richard Allen to shape, and often radicalize, African American movements for self-determination.

Gary Nash further illuminates the contours of Early Republic debates over black citizenship by chronicling the shifting views of two prominent antislavery Philadelphians...