Reviewed by: Jim Crow North: The Struggle for Equal Rights in Antebellum New England by Richard Archer Granville Ganter Richard Archer. Jim Crow North: The Struggle for Equal Rights in Antebellum New England. New York: Oxford UP, 2017. 312 pp. $29.95. It is a testament to the lasting racial prejudices of New England that this book was not written fifty years sooner. Largely because of the NovoAnglophilia of twentieth-century American studies of slavery, until recently there were few sustained critical examinations of pre-Civil War bigotry and racism in the North where antislavery forces were not treated sympathetically. Richard Archer's readable and well-researched book is a welcome resource on the topic, and demonstrates the hostility that African Americans faced even in largely antislavery society. The book is valuable for its sociology of census records as well as for its portraits of African American civic agency after the Revolution. Archer's indexes of African American population numbers, employment, marriage status, and family size, often broken down by state and city, are fascinating. Furthermore, Archer introduces readers to many influential antebellum New England African Americans, only peripherally discussed in antislavery literature, whose efforts fighting Northern prejudice and segregation were effective and deserve better common knowledge. In the book's prefatory chapters, Archer usefully surveys eighteenth-century New England population statistics, slavery laws, and prejudice. The slave population in New England went from about 1,500 people in 1700, to 10,000 by 1750, and then dropped quickly from a high of 15,000 before the Revolution to 1,339 in 1800. In contrast, by 1790 there were 13,059 free blacks in New England and 21,224 by 1830. It would seem from Archer's statistics that the degrees of prejudice African Americans experienced was proportionately related to rapid increases in the slave population from 1700 to 1750, as well as a notable increase in the free black population after 1800. For most of his book, however, Archer concentrates on the fifty years prior to the Civil War. His chapters tend to be short and focus on topics such as the integration of private and public schools in Connecticut, Nantucket, and Boston; the fight against Jim Crow train companies in Massachusetts in the 1840s; resistance to mixed-marriage laws throughout New England; defiance of the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850; and, the advocacy for black militias prior to the war. Largely avoiding the familiar story of white patronage for African American equality, many of Archer's chapters detail steady African American persistence against prejudiced opposition through civic organizations, petitions, and boycotts. The larger picture he paints is of a highly racist New England in the 1820s and '30s that slowly began to soften by 1845. But he also emphasizes the importance of regional differences: Vermont and Maine had relatively tolerant laws and practices, while Connecticut, Rhode Island, and Boston earn the ignominy of being some of the most racist areas of New England prior to the Civil War. Archer's book demonstrates that the fierce criticisms of racial prejudice voiced by pamphleteer David Walker in 1829 and writer-lecturer Maria Stewart from 1831 to 1833 were hardly exceptional. Archer's tables of restricted occupational employment for African Americans vividly confirm Walker's and Stewart's allegations. Among the other African American figures whose social success and political agency Archer surveys, noteworthy figures include Hosea Easton, an outspoken minister and contemporary of both Walker and Stewart. Archer introduces readers to Lemuel Haynes, a black minister to a white congregation in West Rutland, Vermont from 1788 to 1818; Paul Cuffe, a New Bedford-Nantucket ship builder and captain, and one of the wealthiest African Americans of his day; William Cooper Nell, a major force fighting Boston segregation; and John Rock, a Massachusetts doctor. [End Page 239] One of Archer's principal narratives is the ugly story of school integration. Archer reviews the doomed effort to start a black college in New Haven in 1831, and Prudence Crandall's crushed attempt to run an integrated private school in Canterbury, Connecticut from 1832 to 1834, as well as the short-lived Noyes Academy of Canaan, New Hampshire in 1834, destroyed by a...
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Dec 11, 2018
Mary Ann Castronovo Fusco 
Open Access