Educated for Freedom: The Incredible Story of Two Fugitive Schoolboys Who Grew Up to Change a Nation by Anna Mae Duane (review)

The subtitle of Educated for Freedom: The Incredible Story of Two Fugitive Schoolboys Who Grew Up to Change a Nation is actually misleading. This book is much more than a joint biography documenting the decades' long and frequently contentious relationship between James McCune Smith and Henry Highland Garnet. Anna Mae Duane, an associate professor of English at the University of Connecticut, uses their stories to explore the history of the African Free School, the broader story of black education and social possibilities in the antebellum North, white racism, and the African American abolitionist and equal rights movements. Because of the central role Smith and Garnet played in these movements, Duane's "biography" is a valuable historical contribution to our understanding of the role race and racism played in the past and continue to play in American society.

The New York African Free School was established in 1787 by prominent New Yorkers, including Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and Aaron Burr (who Duane does not mention) working through the New-York Manumission Society. The book opens with a commencement address by student Margaret Odle in 1822 where Duane establishes the crucial role of the school in preparing black leaders for the struggle to end slavery in the United States. James McCune Smith (1813–65) and Henry Highland Garnet (1815–82) first met when they attended the African Free School on Mulberry Street in New York City. Smith was two years older than Garnet, who attended from 1826 until 1833, so it is unclear whether they were in the same classes. During their lives they sometimes worked together, but more frequently held conflicting positions in the African American freedom struggle. Yet, in 1865, James McCune Smith wrote the preface, "Sketch of the Life and Labors of Rev. Henry Highland Garnet," as an introduction to the published version of Garnet's "Memorial Discourse" that he delivered in the U.S. House of Representatives on February 12, 1865. In the "Sketch," Smith described Garnet as a schoolboy as "quite the opposite of the nice, good, quiet little fellow in whose mouth 'butter wouldn't melt'" (43).

As Duane notes, the "men disagreed about the possibility of progress and the best way to achieve it in the United States" (6). Duane effectively roots their ideological and political conflicts in the conditions of their lives. Smith, who was born enslaved and appears to have not been emancipated until slavery ended in New York in 1827, became the first African American medical doctor. He believed advancement and eventual equality was possible in the United States, not abandoning this position even after the 1863 assault on New York's Colored Orphan Asylum, where he was the head physician, during the July 1863 Draft Riot. Garnet was born enslaved in Maryland. His family escaped when he was nine, but they always risked reenslavement as fugitives. Throughout his life, Garnet championed resistance to slavery, a position Smith finally embraced after passage of the 1850 federal Fugitive Slave law. While Garnet openly challenged what he considered Frederick Douglass's unwillingness to actively confront slavery, Douglass and Smith were close friends who frequently collaborated. Smith had had positive relationships with whites while a student in Scotland and France. Garnet, who attended the Noyes Academy in Canaan, New Hampshire, when it was destroyed by a white mob, was skeptical about the African American's future in the United States, and as a Presbyterian minister he explored possible resettlement in the Caribbean and West Africa, a position that had been endorsed by the leadership of the African Free School and Abraham Lincoln, but was antithetical to Douglass and Smith. During the Civil War, Garnet, pastor of the Shiloh Presbyterian Church in what is now Soho, recruited African Americans to enlist in the Union Army. Smith, who died of heart failure...