Witness for Freedom: African American Voices on Race, Slavery, and Emancipation

African American Review, Winter, 1995 by Merton L. Dillon

Readers of a certain age will recognize that this splendid book probably would not have been published a generation ago, nor is it much more likely that anyone then would have thought of preparing a book such as Witness for Freedom. In subject matter and approach, this respectful examination of African American participation in the antislavery movement belongs to a new dispensation. Although we have become thoroughly familiar with the changed ethos that makes such works possible, the volume is new enough and momentous enough to inspire wonder and to deserve comment.

The tectonic shift in both popular and scholarly understanding of African American history that first became evident after World War II is by now nearly complete. In consequence most earlier portrayals of every aspect of the subject, but most conspicuously of slavery, have been discarded as at best wrong-headed, at worst malign. Exposure to Ulrich B. Phillips's once-respected studies of slavery, for example, now are routinely preceded by Surgeon General-like warnings of racist contaminants of which earlier readers were unaware.

The principal agents of this profound transformation were a handful of first-rate historians who, in the charged atmosphere of the incipient Civil Rights Movement, approached their studies with assumptions altogether different from those of their predecessors. In the words of Kenneth M. Stamp, one of the earliest and perhaps the most influential proponent of the current view, black "slaves were merely ordinary human beings"; "... innately Negroes are, after all, only white men with black skins, nothing more, nothing less" (The Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the Ante-Bellum South). However far off the mark black separatists and exponents of cultural diversity may find Stampp's formulation, it nonetheless expressed the essence of a changed approach to African American history that soon would become all but universal. It was a change that in due course altered not only scholarship but public policy and private behavior as well.

Scholarly expression of the new attitude appeared most conspicuously in studies of slavery. In a great reversal of interpretation, authoritative new accounts portrayed slaves as creators and transmitters of a vibrant culture rather than as vapid imitators of whites; slaves were strong and resistant rather than weak and passive, as Phillips had thought, and, unbeknownst to their masters, they had created a vital but invisible slave community that shielded them from the most hurtful effects of the cruelty and violation incident to bondage.

Meanwhile, even as publications reflecting the new approach multiplied, scholars, in a strange lapse, left the lives of Northern free blacks for the most part unattended. The most celebrated work on the subject, Leon Litwack's North of Slavery, found them victims of a heartless system of discrimination and repression. The key word here is victims. While the slave, it now was argued, had managed to overcome the most serious effects of oppression, evidence that free blacks in the North succeeded in doing the same thing was not forthcoming. Studies that argued otherwise were few and late to appear.

But were Northern blacks really so different from their Southern counterparts? Did Northern blacks resist their circumstances and find ways to save themselves, as their enslaved cohorts did, by becoming actors rather than mere subjects? Did they, too, through strength of will and character, overcome the indignities and injustice which an unfeeling Northern white society inflicted? The important accomplishment of Witness for Freedom is to provide affirmative answers to these and related questions. Although the scholar who someday will write the much-needed seamless history of African Americans - one that bridges the Mason-Dixon line - has yet to appear, the present volume contains some of the material essential for that enterprise.

In the mid-1970s, Peter Ripley and his associates at Florida State University undertook a search for letters written by black abolitionists, people who, naturally enough, lived in the North. If memory serves, I commented at the time that Ripley et al. had undertaken a search for hens' teeth. I was wrong. Through great industry and ingenuity, the Ripley team recovered some 14,000 letters, speeches, essays, pamphlets, and newspaper editorials located in 110 newspapers, many of them obscure and neglected, and in 200 libraries here and abroad. Subsequently these documents were made available in a seventeen-reel microfilm edition, and a generous selection was published in a five-volume series by the University of North Carolina Press. Under consideration in this review is a sampling of the entire collection, fashioned to reveal the course of Northern black antislavery activities from 1817 to 1865. The selections reveal the advocacy of freedom and equality by a group of remarkable figures, African American women as well as men. They also illustrate the extreme difficulties these persons faced on account of the obstacles a repressive society set in their way. The documents also provide rare and enlightening glimpses of a Northern free black community parallel in some respects to the now familiar Southern slave community; or, as the editors have it, the selections "reveal the full sweep of African American life and culture in antebellum America" (xviii).