Paul J. Polgar. Standard-Bearers of Equality: America’s First Abolition Movement.

Abstract

Standard-Bearers of Equality: America’s First Abolition Movement challenges successfully historical scholarship that places the antebellum-era abolitionist movement as the critical and only significant period of early antislavery activism. Paul J. Polgar invites readers to evaluate the “first movement of abolitionism” of Middle Atlantic states—namely, Pennsylvania and New York—in order to review the multicultural roots of activism and gradual abolitionist leadership spanning the postrevolutionary and early national periods. His book references the movement’s early roots built upon the Germantown Protest of 1688 and later individual work of many New Jersey and Pennsylvania Quakers, including John Woolman, Anthony Benezet, Benjamin Lay, and David Cooper (4, 44–52). Yet, when quoting Quaker mystic and visionary Woolman, Polgar might have referenced Andrew White’s article, “A ‘Consuming’ Oppression: Sugar, Cannibalism and John Woolman’s 1770 Slave Dream,” (2007) on consumer boycotts advocated by Woolman to boycott sugar and other goods made by slaves that were more radical in nature than those held by the majority of abolitionists of his day and the first movement period (2, 10, 17–18, 23, 24). Historian Julie L. Holcomb dedicated her book, Moral Commerce: Quakers and the Transatlantic Boycott of the Slave Labor Economy (2016), to evaluating the power of a consumer boycott and within it described Woolman’s boycott strategy to combat “evil commerce” as it related to capitalism and the slave industry (31).