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

Abstract

Reviewed by: Standard-Bearers of Equality: America's First Abolition Movement by Paul J. Polgar Eric Herschthal (bio) Standard-Bearers of Equality: America's First Abolition Movement. By Paul J. Polgar. (Chapel Hill: Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture and University of North Carolina Press, 2019. Pp. 342. Cloth, $39.95.) For the past several decades, many scholars have portrayed the original abolitionist societies of the revolutionary era as pale comparisons to their more radical antebellum successors. Unlike the Garrisonian movement, the first abolitionist societies prioritized gradual emancipation laws that promised freedom to enslaved people only after they completed decades of service and only to those born after the law's passage. These societies were composed exclusively of well-heeled white men, who believed that [End Page 107] the best way to defeat prejudice and give freed Black Americans a fighting chance at full citizenship was for free Blacks to uplift themselves through education, sobriety, and moral rectitude. Though early abolitionists helped all six original northern states pass some form of gradual emancipation law by 1804, in less than two decades newly freed Black northerners were stripped of basic citizenship rights, while many early white abolitionists began to see colonization—the voluntary removal of freed Blacks—as the only viable path to nationwide emancipation. In Paul Polgar's audacious account of what he calls "first movement abolitionism," this narrative requires revision. The first abolitionist societies worked closely with free Black northerners and fervently advocated full Black citizenship. While Polgar does not deny early white abolitionists' paternalism or ignore the limitations of their gradualist approach, he convincingly demolishes any presumption that the first abolitionist societies were skeptical about Black people's essential equality or equal place in the new nation. Though first movement abolitionists displayed less militancy and urgency than Garrisonians, they were no less committed to the complete destruction of slavery and racism. Standard-Bearers of Equality focuses on the Pennsylvania Abolition Society (PAS) and the New-York Manumission Society (NYMS), the early republic's most influential abolition societies, as well as their close relationships with the nation's most prominent free Black leaders: Absalom Jones, James Forten, and Peter Williams Jr., among many others. By closely reading abolition society minutes and the papers of free Black northern leaders, Polgar underscores that early abolitionism was far more interracial than an emphasis on the exclusively white membership of the early societies suggests. Moreover, he shows that early white abolitionists' interests in funding free Black schools and churches, rooted in a belief that Black uplift would defeat white racism, was nearly identical to what many Black northern leaders promoted. Though it may have been paternalistic and naive to believe that proper Black behavior would eradicate white racism, it was neither exclusive to white abolitionists nor evidence of anti-Black prejudice. Polgar contends that early abolitionists' support for full Black citizenship can be best evinced in their basic strategy of enforcing and expanding the first gradual emancipation laws—premised on the assumption that enslavement was a violation of what Polgar calls "elemental citizenship" (143). But a more compelling case lies in the mountain of evidence he provides that show Black and white abolitionists routinely challenging any attempt to curb free Black political rights. When the New York state legislature considered its first gradual emancipation law in 1785, slavery's [End Page 108] advocates added amendments that would have denied Black men the right to vote, hold office, and serve on juries featuring white defendants. But the NYMS rallied against the bill precisely because it would have turned freed Blacks into second-class citizens. (The eventual abolition that did pass in 1799 placed no restrictions on Black political rights.) Likewise, white and Black abolitionists successfully defeated the Pennsylvania legislature's numerous attempts to curb Black voting rights between 1805 and 1813. Yet early abolitionists' initial optimism began to sour in the 1820s. In his final chapters, Polgar meticulously reconstructs the reasons why many, if hardly all, white abolitionists began to embrace colonization in the 1820s. The emergence of the American Colonization Society in 1816 reinvigorated a conservative antislavery impulse in the Upper South, convincing many northern white abolitionists that southern slaveholders could...