A loose-knit synthesis of ideas, movements and organisations, the first abolition movement, Paul Polgar argues, reached its apogee in the first decade of the nineteenth century when the end of slavery seemed possible. Born of beliefs in racial equality, Enlightenment ideals and Quaker theology, organisations arose to supply legal assistance to free blacks imprisoned under fugitive slave laws, support schools or advocate for the extension of full legal rights and social and economic equality for blacks. The groups coalesced around the common belief that the advancement of these goals could best be accomplished first through the elimination of chattel slavery. Despite initial successes with manumission, however, the movement fractured when its consensus foundered over differences regarding the colonisation of American blacks in Africa.
Polgar sees the first abolition movement originating in the Middle Atlantic states and growing out of unique circumstances that gave rise to abolitionist sentiments. In Philadelphia and its immediate environs, for example, Quaker activism based upon the doctrine of an inner light common to all led to beliefs in racial equality and opposition to slavery and found common ideological ground with other whites holding ideas derived from the Enlightenment and the statements of universal human rights in the Declaration of Independence. These forces coincided with the concurrent emergence of a vital, successful community of free blacks seeking the end to white racism. Thus, the message of mid eighteenth-century opponents to slavery like Quakers John Woolman and Anthony Benezet resonated with prominent Philadelphians like Benjamin Rush, combined with a black community led by assertive, prominent merchants like James Forten and ministers like Richard Allen and Absalom Jones, and led to the founding of the Pennsylvania Abolition Society (PAS). A similar development took place in New York when Peter Jay, son of the diplomat and chief justice John Jay, joined with prominent black New Yorkers like the political activist and Federalist Joseph Sidney and the Methodist minister William Miller, to establish the New York Manumission Society (NYMS).
The PAS and NYMS were representative of numerous other, like-minded, groups in the Middle Atlantic states that supported antislavery laws and then moved on to advocate for abolition. As they moved from specific programmes – such as providing legal assistance to free blacks subjected to being enslaved under fugitive slave laws and supporting black schools – to coordinating their activities in common abolition activities, the organisations joined together during the last decade of the eighteenth century to form what became the American Convention of Abolition Societies (ACAS). Ironically, as Polgar makes clear, although the creation of the ACAS was the high point of this consensus, it broke down after the establishment of the American Colonization Society (ACS) in 1817 because of its goal to send manumitted slaves to Liberia. To the union of northern reformers and philanthropic southern slaveholders, the ACS seemed to offer a practical, if limited and gradual solution to the dislocations caused by the emancipation of the enslaved, but it fractured the ACAS and the first abolition movement's interracial consensus. The ACS's gradualist approach was an inherently unstable compromise that could not be sustained as slavery became more profitable and white racism increased during the second and third decades of the nineteenth century. Because the South's manumission laws required that freed slaves leave the state, blacks, generally freed in the Upper South, migrated to adjoining Middle Atlantic states which had, heretofore, been the core of northern support for the ACAS and other abolition societies. While some prominent blacks favoured colonisation because it encouraged manumission and offered opportunities in Africa, thus justifying cultural and economic autonomy, most saw it as a façade, as a cloak to hide growing white racism or, indeed, as a manifestation of policies intended to eliminate free communities of colour. Moreover, as southern slaveholders increasingly came to influence the ACS and as it adopted more racist language in its publications and policies, early black supporters of colonisation like Forten switched to opposition, polarising the ACAS on the basis of race and leading to the withdrawal of black support for it. Furthermore, the whites that remained split between pragmatists who thought colonisation encouraged emancipation and stalwarts who, aligning themselves with black members, believed it premised racial reform on white prejudice. By the 1830s, the white stalwarts had become marginalised, and the effectiveness of the ACAS essentially nullified, bringing about the end of the first abolitionist movement. Despite its demise, Polgar argues that the original idealism and activism lived on in black communities and, to a lesser degree, was resurrected by new figures such as William Lloyd Garrison. Rejecting colonisation, free blacks sustained the original abolitionists’ vision for not only the eradication of slavery but for the achievement of legal equality and dignity for themselves and their communities.
In his tracing of the origins of the PAS, NYMS, the ACAS and their relationship to the ACS, Polgar has provided a useful analysis of the complexities of the abolitionist and colonisation movements in the early republic. While the PAS and NYMS are the centrepieces of this book, Polgar's care in documenting the difficulties of the ACAS and ACS and, more generally, the larger context of abolition in the early nineteenth century contributes to our understanding of the complexities of the colonisation movement and the ebb and rise of white racism. Deeply researched and capacious in its use of both primary and secondary sources, Standard-bearers of equality is a painful reminder of a moment in America's history of slavery and racism and of paths and opportunities not taken.
