Witness for Freedom: African American Voices on Race, Slavery, and Emancipation.

Reviewed by Merton L. Dillon Ohio State University 

Readers of a certain age will recognize that this splendid book probably would not have been published a generation ago, nor is it much more likely that anyone then would have thought of preparing a book such as Witness for Freedom. In subject matter and approach, this respectful examination of African American participation in the antislavery movement belongs to a new dispensation. Although we have become thoroughly familiar with the changed ethos that makes such works possible, the volume is new enough and momentous enough to inspire wonder and to deserve comment.

The tectonic shift in both popular and scholarly understanding of African American history that first became evident after World War II is by now nearly complete. In consequence most earlier portrayals of every aspect of the subject, but most conspicuously of slavery, have been discarded as at best wrong-headed, at worst malign. Exposure to Ulrich B. Phillips's once-respected studies of slavery, for example, now are routinely preceded by Surgeon General-like warnings of racist contaminants of which earlier readers were unaware.

The principal agents of this profound transformation were a handful of first-rate historians who, in the charged atmosphere of the incipient Civil Rights Movement, approached their studies with assumptions altogether different from those of their predecessors. In the words of Kenneth M. Stamp, one of the earliest and perhaps the most influential proponent of the current view, black "slaves were merely ordinary human beings"; "... innately Negroes are, after all, only white men with black skins, nothing more, nothing less" (The Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the Ante-Bellum South). However far off the mark black separatists and exponents of cultural diversity may find Stampp's formulation, it nonetheless expressed the essence of a changed approach to African American history that soon would become all but universal. It was a change that in due course altered not only scholarship but public policy and private behavior as well.

Scholarly expression of the new attitude appeared most conspicuously in studies of slavery. In a great reversal of interpretation, authoritative new accounts portrayed slaves as creators and transmitters of a vibrant culture rather than as vapid imitators of whites; slaves were strong and resistant rather than weak and passive, as Phillips had thought, and, unbeknownst to their masters, they had created a vital but invisible slave community that shielded them from the most hurtful effects of the cruelty and violation incident to bondage.

Meanwhile, even as publications reflecting the new approach multiplied, scholars, in a strange lapse, left the lives of Northern free blacks for the most part unattended. The most celebrated work on the subject, Leon Litwack's North of Slavery, found them victims of a heartless system of discrimination and repression. The key word here is victims. While the slave, it now was argued, had managed to overcome the most serious effects of oppression, evidence that free blacks in the North succeeded in doing the same thing was not forthcoming. Studies that argued otherwise were few and late to appear.

But were Northern blacks really so different from their Southern counterparts? Did Northern blacks resist their circumstances and find ways to save themselves, as their enslaved cohorts did, by becoming actors rather than mere subjects? Did they, too, through strength of will and character, overcome the indignities and injustice which an unfeeling Northern white society inflicted? The important accomplishment of Witness for Freedom is to provide affirmative answers to these and related questions. Although the scholar who someday will write the much-needed seamless history of African Americans - one that bridges the Mason-Dixon line - has yet to appear, the present volume contains some of the material essential for that enterprise.

In the mid-1970s, Peter Ripley and his associates at Florida State University undertook a search for letters written by black abolitionists, people who, naturally enough, lived in the North. If memory serves, I commented at the time that Ripley et al. had undertaken a search for hens' teeth. I was wrong. Through great industry and ingenuity, the Ripley team recovered some 14,000 letters, speeches, essays, pamphlets, and newspaper editorials located in 110 newspapers, many of them obscure and neglected, and in 200 libraries here and abroad. Subsequently these documents were made available in a seventeen-reel microfilm edition, and a generous selection was published in a five-volume series by the University of North Carolina Press. Under consideration in this review is a sampling of the entire collection, fashioned to reveal the course of Northern black antislavery activities from 1817 to 1865. The selections reveal the advocacy of freedom and equality by a group of remarkable figures, African American women as well as men. They also illustrate the extreme difficulties these persons faced on account of the obstacles a repressive society set in their way. The documents also provide rare and enlightening glimpses of a Northern free black community parallel in some respects to the now familiar Southern slave community; or, as the editors have it, the selections "reveal the full sweep of African American life and culture in antebellum America" (xviii).

Such is not, however, the editors' main concern. Their primary interest is the part these people played in the campaign against slavery. Thus the documents are prefaced with a substantial history of the antislavery movement. In this account, the black component comes near to overwhelming the white. It is a perspective that may take some getting used to, since most existing accounts of abolitionism (Benjamin Quarles's Black Abolitionists being the most notable exception) focus on white men and women - their motivation, relationships, words, programs and exploits - with African Americans usually appearing only as adjuncts. Readers are familiar with the names of the chief white protagonists from frequent repetition - William Lloyd Garrison, Benjamin Lundy, Wendell Phillips, Theodore Weld, John Brown - and those whose net has been cast wide enough also know something of Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman. But here most people's acquaintance with black abolitionism likely ends. Thus, most readers will encounter the majority of actors in this book for the first time. Although we may have seen their names in encyclopedic accounts, we soon realize that their words and deeds have not been absorbed into the antislavery narrative. Such neglect, it appears, cannot longer be tolerated.

Witness for Freedom shows African Americans shaping the crusade against slavery at many points. It is not Garrison in Boston and the Lane Seminary students in Cincinnati who inaugurate the abolitionists' bitter war against colonization. Responsible instead are free blacks in Eastern cities who as early as 1817 rejected the prospect of removal to Africa and eventually persuaded Garrison and others to adopt the anticolonization position as their own. It is black activists, not the writings of George Bourne and Elizabeth Heyrick, who persuade Garrison to make immediate emancipation the central plank in the American Anti-Slavery Society's platform. It is blacks, not Garrison or Lydia Maria Child, who first insist that the end of racial prejudice is essential to the end of slavery and who continue to agitate that contentious point when others conveniently neglect or abandon it. Even discounting for revisionism's characteristic overstatement, these claims cannot be ignored.

Along the way, in the documents that support the above interpretation, we encounter a progression of strong figures: David Walker, first in the guise of organizer and then in his more familiar revolutionary cloak; Robert Purvis, grieving at violence directed against unoffending black folk; Peter Paul Simons, concluding that direct action, not moral reformation and moral suasion, provides African Americans their only realistic hope for relief from oppression; John Copeland, Jr., fated for execution as coadjutor of John Brown at Harper's Ferry, conveying to his parents his confidence in the righteousness of the cause for which he is about to die.

As this book shows, the Civil War and Reconstruction brought African Americans great hope and satisfaction. Their contributions to both had been considerable, and Emancipation was an achievement filled with promise. Yet the ambiguities and paradoxes of the era also led to serious misgiving. Like white abolitionists, African Americans viewed emancipation as the culmination of their decades-long struggle for justice, but far more acutely than their white coadjutors, they could not ignore the partial nature of their accomplishment. Overwhelming evidence of continuing prejudice and discrimination threatened to compromise the victory and suggested its partial character. Witness for Freedom makes clear that African Americans understood the lesson of the hour as few whites did: Emancipation marked only a milestone in the journey to freedom, not its end.

This valuable collection should lead readers to the voluminous documentation of the same subjects contained in the five volumes of The Black Abolitionist Papers, from which it is drawn. There one may find an even more ample record of the relentless struggle that generations of free African Americans waged against slavery and prejudice, a struggle likely to inspire admiration in all Americans, if not hope.