More than Freedom: Fighting for Black Citizenship in a White Republic, 1829–1889 by Stephen Kantrowitz (review)

More than Freedom is an ambitious, path-breaking account of black politics in the nineteenth-century North, one that intervenes in important debates about the history of American abolitionism, antebellum politics, Reconstruction, and black community life. Moving gracefully among the registers of social, intellectual, and political history, Kantrowitz recasts black abolitionism in much broader terms as a struggle over the possession and meaning of citizenship.

Two major themes have stood out in scholarship on black abolitionism: where blacks figure in the larger abolitionist movement, which made “abolitionism” interracial and profoundly shaped its goals and how black abolitionism related to broader traditions of black resistance, whether among slaves in the South or the various kinds of black activism prevalent in northern communities. Kantrowitz makes signal contributions to both, combining some of the best elements of the community study with what Patrick Rael has called the “new black intellectual history” to achieve a highly original thesis about the nature and impact of nineteenth-century black politics. Like the best social histories of northern black communities, Kantrowitz’s book argues that the work of community-building (with its churches, literary societies, newspapers) was the foundation of the protest tradition of which abolitionism was part. The author makes a compelling case for the centrality of Boston’s black activists in the history of American abolitionism, documenting their role in the far-flung archipelago of North America’s free black communities. He then brings black Boston to life by telling its story, largely through the lives of a generation of men born in the 1810s and ’20s, such as William Cooper Nell, John S. Rock, and especially Lewis Hayden. Setting these leading figures in a rich institutional context, Kantrowitz adds to our understanding of black freemasonry and the independent black church as integral parts of a larger history of struggle over citizenship.

Kantrowitz’s core argument is that a substantial and important population of free black Bostonians fought not only to end slavery but also to define citizenship in ways that would include African Americans and expand its meaning beyond what eventually would be called civil rights (the principle of equality before law). Their search for a broader, social citizenship began very early. It turned their energies both inward (creating and nurturing black institutions) and outward (working with and sometimes jostling against white abolitionists and white mainstream politicians). As ambitious as their vision of citizenship was, black activists evinced a form of political pragmatism wrought through hard experience. Perhaps nowhere was that pragmatism more vividly on display than in 1854, when some black activists struck a deal with white nativists, trading school desegregation for a slate of Know-Nothings in office.

Kantrowitz makes clear that some African Americans shared the anti-immigrant biases common among whites, while others acted out of expediency, hoping to ride anti-immigrant exclusion to achieve black inclusion. Such episodes throw into sharp relief the promise and peril of what he argues was a profound desire on the part of black activists for “a citizenship of the heart,” a “universal brotherhood” beyond legal and political rights that would forge “bonds of trust and even love across the color line” (6). Kantrowitz invites us to think of black activists as debating—always thoughtfully, often noisily—how to chart a course between abstract principles and concrete results, between building inward-looking institutions and demanding acceptance from the white republic.

Scholarship on American abolitionism has often split along racial lines, and while black activists are Kantrowitz’s main protagonists, he also chronicles astutely their relationship to white abolitionists in ways that yield real insight about the history of abolitionism generally. His charting of black activists’ momentous push into politics neatly sidesteps the integrationism/separatism debate, framing “black political activity” as both an outgrowth of all-black institutional life and the necessary partner of Garrisonianism (169).

Kantrowitz’s...