A Gentleman of Color
A Gentleman of Color

Author: Julie Winch

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2003-06-05

Total Pages: 532

ISBN-13: 9780195347456

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Winch has written the first full-length biography of James Forten, a hero of African American history and one of the most remarkable men in 19th-century America. Born into a free black family in 1766, Forten served in the Revolutionary War as a teenager. By 1810 he had earned the distinction of being the leading sailmaker in Philadelphia. Soon after Forten emerged as a leader in Philadelphia's black community and was active in a wide range of reform activities. Especially prominent in national and international antislavery movements, he served as vice-president of the American Anti-Slavery Society and became close friends with William Lloyd Garrison to whom he lent money to start up the Liberator. His family were all active abolitionists and a granddaughter, Charlotte Forten, published a famous diary of her experiences teaching ex-slaves in South Carolina's Sea Islands during the Civil War. This is the first serious biography of Forten, who stands beside Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, and Martin Luther King, Jr., in the pantheon of African Americans who fundamentally shaped American history.

The Slave's Cause
The Slave's Cause

Author: Manisha Sinha

Publisher: Yale University Press

Published: 2016-02-23

Total Pages: 809

ISBN-13: 0300182082

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“Traces the history of abolition from the 1600s to the 1860s . . . a valuable addition to our understanding of the role of race and racism in America.”—Florida Courier Received historical wisdom casts abolitionists as bourgeois, mostly white reformers burdened by racial paternalism and economic conservatism. Manisha Sinha overturns this image, broadening her scope beyond the antebellum period usually associated with abolitionism and recasting it as a radical social movement in which men and women, black and white, free and enslaved found common ground in causes ranging from feminism and utopian socialism to anti-imperialism and efforts to defend the rights of labor. Drawing on extensive archival research, including newly discovered letters and pamphlets, Sinha documents the influence of the Haitian Revolution and the centrality of slave resistance in shaping the ideology and tactics of abolition. This book is a comprehensive history of the abolition movement in a transnational context. It illustrates how the abolitionist vision ultimately linked the slave’s cause to the struggle to redefine American democracy and human rights across the globe. “A full history of the men and women who truly made us free.”—Ira Berlin, The New York Times Book Review “A stunning new history of abolitionism . . . [Sinha] plugs abolitionism back into the history of anticapitalist protest.”—The Atlantic “Will deservedly take its place alongside the equally magisterial works of Ira Berlin on slavery and Eric Foner on the Reconstruction Era.”—The Wall Street Journal “A powerfully unfamiliar look at the struggle to end slavery in the United States . . . as multifaceted as the movement it chronicles.”—The Boston Globe

The Counter-Revolution of 1776
The Counter-Revolution of 1776

Author: Gerald Horne

Publisher: NYU Press

Published: 2016-09

Total Pages: 363

ISBN-13: 1479806897

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Illuminates how the preservation of slavery was a motivating factor for the Revolutionary War The successful 1776 revolt against British rule in North America has been hailed almost universally as a great step forward for humanity. But the Africans then living in the colonies overwhelmingly sided with the British. In this trailblazing book, Gerald Horne shows that in the prelude to 1776, the abolition of slavery seemed all but inevitable in London, delighting Africans as much as it outraged slaveholders, and sparking the colonial revolt. Prior to 1776, anti-slavery sentiments were deepening throughout Britain and in the Caribbean, rebellious Africans were in revolt. For European colonists in America, the major threat to their security was a foreign invasion combined with an insurrection of the enslaved. It was a real and threatening possibility that London would impose abolition throughout the colonies—a possibility the founding fathers feared would bring slave rebellions to their shores. To forestall it, they went to war. The so-called Revolutionary War, Horne writes, was in part a counter-revolution, a conservative movement that the founding fathers fought in order to preserve their right to enslave others. The Counter-Revolution of 1776 brings us to a radical new understanding of the traditional heroic creation myth of the United States.

Antislavery and Abolition in Philadelphia
Antislavery and Abolition in Philadelphia

Author: Richard Newman

Publisher: LSU Press

Published: 2011-11-14

Total Pages: 274

ISBN-13: 0807139912

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Antislavery and Abolition in Philadelphia considers the cultural, political, and religious contexts shaping the long struggle against racial injustice in one of early America's most important cities. Comprised of nine scholarly essays by a distinguished group of historians, the volume recounts the antislavery movement in Philadelphia from its marginalized status during the colonial era to its rise during the Civil War. Philadelphia was the home to the Society of Friends, which offered the first public attack on slavery in the 1680s; the Pennsylvania Abolition Society, the western world's first antislavery group; and to generations of abolitionists who organized some of early America's most important civil rights groups. These abolitionists -- black, white, religious, secular, male, female -- grappled with the meaning of black freedom earlier and more consistently than anyone else in early American culture. Cutting-edge academic views illustrate Philadelphia's antislavery movement, how it survived societal opposition, and how it remained vital to evolving notions of racial justice.