Time of Trial

Abstract

Abstract What Even the most zealous of white abolitionists were inclined to overlook was that freedom from slavery was not synonymous with full citizenship. A black man or woman need not wear a slave’s shackles to he “unfree.” Every day of their lives free people of color grappled with the reality of discrimination. In most states of the Union the law relegated them to a situation of quasifreedom. They lived in a particular state, hut they did not “belong” to it in the same way that their white neighbors did. Their presence was tolerated, nothing more. And as the racial violence that beset so many communities in the 1830s and 1840s made abundantly clear, it was not at all certain that their presence would continue to be tolerated. James Forten was a perennial manager of the American Anti-Slavery Society. His sons and his son-in-law were officers in that same organization. His wife and daughters helped found the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society, one of the first women’s abolition societies in the nation.