To Make Themselves Free

During the final Civil War sesquicentennial celebrations, commentators and journalists often mentioned black self-liberation during the last months of the conflict. As these four books remind us, African Americans had been liberating themselves long before 1864. For these activists, freedom for themselves was only part of their struggle, as they promptly turned their energies into organized abolitionism, assisting those who escaped after them, and finally in donning a blue uniform and fighting for the liberation of four million enslaved Americans.

In To Plead Our Own Cause: African Americans in Massachusetts and the Making of the Antislavery Movement, Christopher Cameron, editor of two collections of documents and a founder of the African American Intellectual History Society’s blog, builds upon the work of Graham Russell Gao Hodges, Richard Newman, and others who have placed the origins of the antislavery movement in the black community and traced its activism to free black urban communities during the Revolutionary era. Hodges and Newman focus on New York and Philadelphia, with their commercial, Dutch, and Quaker influences. Cameron notes, however, that the hotbed for the most radical strain of abolition emerged in Boston, where William Lloyd Garrison received credit for founding the movement. Yet Garrison only built upon existing black organizations, and Cameron has set out to investigate their history.

Absent the influence of Quakers, Cameron finds the seeds of Massachusetts antislavery sentiment in the Calvinist theology absorbed by Africans and African Americans enslaved in the colony. The Puritans encouraged their slaves to embrace Christianity, fearing God’s wrath should they not. They did not, however, anticipate that their slaves would find in religion an argument for emancipation. Indeed, the closest white Puritans came to an antislavery position was in Samuel Sewell’s 1700 proposition that the colony should encourage the import of white servants to forestall the development of a free black population and then exploit that free black population by requiring its labor for the state rather than militia service.

Although only 15 percent of the black population of Massachusetts converted during the mid–eighteenth-century Great Awakening, and only 3 to 4 percent in Boston did so, those who did found empowerment in church membership. As early as 1693, enslaved men and women in Cotton Mather’s congregation forced him to allow the formation of the Society of Negroes. Ostensibly focused on matters of worship, the society actually acted as a mutual beneficial society that advanced the interests of its members within the church and served as a precursor to an unnamed 1773 society of enslaved men and women who actively worked against slavery. By that time, a potent blend of Calvinism and republican ideology produced a black liberation theology, which Cameron highlights through the work of Phillis Wheatley, Cesar Sarter, and Lemuel Hayes. Foreshadowing David Walker and Maria Stewart, whom Cameron covers in the final chapter, these writers warned that God’s vengeance would become manifest in slave rebellions should the new nation not renounce its human property.

Ideology was not the only front advanced against slavery. Cameron points out that the Puritan “just war” rationalization for slavery produced a legal system that recognized the humanity of slaves, and slaves used that peculiarity to sue for their own freedom. That 1773 society of slaves mobilized to establish connections with white sympathizers and publish freedom petitions and essays against human bondage. Aware that...