Freedom by Degrees - Emancipation in Eighteenth-Century Pennsylvania and its Aftermath (Hardcover)

During the revolutionary era, in the midst of the struggle for liberty from Great Britain, Americans up and down the Atlantic seaboard confronted the injustice of holding slaves. Lawmakers debated abolition, masters considered freeing their slaves, and slaves emancipated themselves by running away. But by 1800, of states south of New England, only Pennsylvania had extricated itself from slavery, the triumph, historians have argued, of Quaker moralism and the philosophy of natural rights. With exhaustive research of individual acts of freedom, slave escapes, legislative action, and anti-slavery appeals, Nash and Soderlund penetrate beneath such broad generalizations and find a more complicated process at work. Defiant runaway slaves joined Quaker abolitionists like Anthony Benezet and members of the Pennsylvania Abolition Society to end slavery and slave owners shrewdly calculated how to remove themselves from a morally bankrupt institution without suffering financial loss by freeing slaves as indentured servants, laborers, and cottagers.

General

Imprint:	Oxford UniversityPress
Country of origin:	United States
Release date:	April 1991
First published:	1991
Authors:	Gary B. Nash (Professor of History) • Jean R. Soderlund (Archivist, Peace Collection)
Dimensions:	217 x 148 x 25mm (L x W x T)
Format:	Hardcover - Cloth over boards
Pages:	266
ISBN-13:	978-0-19-504583-3
Categories:	Books > Humanities > History > World history > 1750 to 1900 Books > Humanities > History > American history > General Books > Social sciences > Politics & government > Political control & freedoms > Slavery & emancipation Books > History > American history > General Books > History > World history > 1750 to 1900
LSN:	0-19-504583-1
Barcode:	9780195045833

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