Seeking Abolition: Black Letter Writers and the Pennsylvania Abolition Society in the Era of Gradual Emancipation

Abstract

During the era of gradual emancipation, between about 1780 and 1830, ordinary African Americans tested the power of correspondence in efforts to advance their claims to freedom. Their demands often exceeded the limits of emancipation laws, but the letters themselves became a form of evidence in cases that challenged the existing legal regime. This article draws upon the correspondence files of the Pennsylvania Abolition Society to reveal a pattern of antislavery activism in which enslaved and free Black correspondents communicated their views directly white abolitionists, seeing themselves as participants in a cooperative activist partnership. Writing as deferential petitioners, indignant parents, aggrieved victims, and shrewd negotiators—sometimes all within the space of the same letter—African Americans used correspondence to present their political concerns as inseparable from their daily lives. Harnessing the medium of correspondence, they made immediate demands for legal freedom and relief from suffering. They also made implicit claims to equality through their conscious deployment of language and letter-writing conventions to reflect good moral character—a prerequisite for equal membership in the body politic. Together, these sources demonstrate that African Americans used letter-writing to secure freedom for themselves and their families as well as to emphasize the universal injustice of slavery and the moral obligation to oppose it.