The First Emancipation: The Abolition of Slavery in the North

by Arthur Zilversmit

Book by Arthur Zilversmit

262 pages, Paperback

First published June 1, 1967

Reviews

[Lawrence A · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a well-written monograph explaining, in detail, how slavery was abolished in the northern states of the US during the period beginning in 1777 and ending in 1840. The "peculiar institution," as slavery was popularly known back then, unfortunately had remarkable staying power in many northern states. Vermont, the 14th state in the union, abolished slavery in its first state constitution in 1777, while slavery was effectively abolished only a few years later in Massachusetts and New Hampshire as a result of several court decisions holding that slavery violated the bill of rights contained in the constitutions of each of those states. Nonetheless, it took until the 1790s for Connecticut, Rhode Island, and Pennsylvania to legislatively abolish slavery, and then only gradually. New York and New Jersey were the most recalcitrant northern slaveowning states, with New York waiting until 1799, and New Jersey until 1806, to enact gradual emancipation laws, each of which did not free a single slave until the 1820s at the earliest, and both of which, in effect, compensated slaveowners from public funds. It's hard to realize now, but "legal" slaves still lived in NJ until the mid-1840s. Zilversmit explains that political and judicial abolition in the north resulted from the confluence of revolutionary fervor and the enlightenment ideals of the "Rights of Man" developed during the 1770s, the fear of nothern whites that their calls for "liberty" from Great Britain would be seen as rank hypocrisy if they continued to own slaves, the application of religious tenets [particularly those of the Quakers in PA, RI, and parts of NJ, and later the Congregationalists in MA and CT], and the desire to develop a political community in which free white labor was paramount. He further explains that greed, fear and hatred of Africans, concern that freed Africans would have to be cared for at public expense, and concern for "property rights" [which, along with the natural right to liberty, was also an enlightenment-era value] slowed that process, particularly in NY and NJ.