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Epilogue Inescapable The connection of past and present helped to define the hazards and the pathos of free black life in the North. In 1830, Sally, a black woman from Ulster County, fell into the hands of an unscrupulous white trader. Her former master, George Tappen, wanted to assert the legal protection available to Sally under state law and wished to offer information to establish her identity . Tappen noted that one of the woman’s sons still lived nearby but that he had lost track of another son; as Tappen explained, “there are no slaves in this State, the Blacks are all at liberty to go where they please. . . .” Black freedom and mobility made it harder for individual whites to assert their authority or, as in this instance, to extend their assistance. Thus, soberingly, the former master expressed the fear that Sally might find herself “in danger of being conveyed beyond our reach or knowledge,” presumably into the thriving heart of American slave country.1 Like disfranchisement, kidnapping was an unavoidable reminder of the immediacy of slavery’s history in New York. Thus, even as the battle over race and slavery in the north was transformed by the third decade of the nineteenth century, it reflected the lasting legacy of the previous half-century.2 Events in New York laid the groundwork for and prefigured the post-1830 antebellum era in which free blacks and white abolitionists chafed against a hardening vision of racial difference. If black bodies were no longer legally traded and sold in New York, the image of African Americans was nonetheless thoroughly commodified and consumed through the growth of New York’s minstrel stage. Packed audiences of working-class whites, many of them immigrants, learned the racial codes of America by mocking and embracing stage black speech and song. The ground had been well prepared for the popular theater of “whiteness” and “blackness” in anecdotes and letters pretending to recreate black speech in eighteenth-century newspapers, in hostile broadsides and taunts directed toward black parades, and in the early 1820s when the African Grove Theatre was driven out of business through a campaign of organized and orchestrated harassment. Developments in the realm of culture found their more concrete expression in antebellum New York in antiblack mob violence, segregation of public accommodations, and continued denial of the right of suffrage.3 Epilogue: Inescapable 221 Despite and because of these developments, on their newly free soil, citizens of New York state played a major role in creating new kinds of abolitionism . The “second wave” of abolitionism is often associated closely with the Garrisonians of Massachusetts, who made their mark through uncompromising immediatism and “mass action strategies.”4 As modern abolitionism found multiple forms of expression in the antebellum period, the road to the future literally and figuratively traveled through New York. Birthplace of Sojourner Truth and Freedom’s Journal, New York became the home of Lewis Tappan’s benevolent empire and center of a circle of influential Christian immediatists as well. Even Westchester County judge William Jay, whose father John was the archetype of New York–style gradualism, would embrace the cause of immediatism, a movement which took as an article of faith that the draining of the moral swamp of slavery could not be indefinitely postponed and that the passage of time strengthened rather than weakened the institution. Meanwhile, upstate New York would provide a generation of shock troops for various strains of radical abolitionism and elected one of the boldest advocates of political abolitionism and interracial cooperation, Gerrit Smith, to the U.S. Congress.5 Although only the most daring blacks and whites would forge meaningful friendships across the color line, hearing one another’s voices in a different key than that offered on the minstrel stage became an essential element of the abolitionist crusade in the coming decades. Thus, the first-person runaway slave narrative emerged as a powerful form of sentimentalized antislavery discourse.6 But sometimes the form of address was even more direct, sentiment leavened with accusation. When Frederick Douglass gave his famous 1852 speech “What does the Fourth of July mean to the Negro” in Rochester, New York, he was not speaking to or for black people; he was challenging white people to rethink the implications of their history and to redefine the meaning of American freedom. Douglass drew distinctions between black and white historical memory in order to redefine the struggle blacks and...

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