Freedom by Degrees: Emancipation in Pennsylvania and Its Aftermath

Gary B. Nash · Jean R. Soderlund

Jan 1991 · Oxford University Press

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During the revolutionary era, in the midst of the struggle for liberty from Great Britain, Americans up and down the Atlantic seaboard confronted the injustice of holding slaves. Lawmakers debated abolition, masters considered freeing their slaves, and slaves emancipated themselves by running away. But by 1800, of states south of New England, only Pennsylvania had extricated itself from slavery, the triumph, historians have argued, of Quaker moralism and the philosophy of natural rights. With exhaustive research of individual acts of freedom, slave escapes, legislative action, and anti-slavery appeals, Nash and Soderlund penetrate beneath such broad generalizations and find a more complicated process at work. Defiant runaway slaves joined Quaker abolitionists like Anthony Benezet and members of the Pennsylvania Abolition Society to end slavery and slave owners shrewdly calculated how to remove themselves from a morally bankrupt institution without suffering financial loss by freeing slaves as indentured servants, laborers, and cottagers.

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Gary B. Nash was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania on July 27, 1933. He received a B. A. in 1955 and a Ph.D. in 1964 from Princeton University. He has taught colonial and revolutionary American history at the University of California at Los Angeles since 1966. He won the University of California Distinguished Emeriti Award and the Defense of Academic Freedom Award from the National Council for Social Studies. He is the author of numerous books including Quakers and Politics: Pennsylvania, 1681-1726; Red, White and Black: The Peoples of Early America; The Urban Crucible: Social Change, Political Consciousness, and the Origins of the American Revolution; Forging Freedom: The Black Urban Experience in Philadelphia, 1720-1840; and The Forgotten Fifth: African Americans in the Age of Revolution.