Free Black Activism in the Antebellum North.

Abstract

IN FEW OTHER REALMS of historical scholarship have the last three decades witnessed such all-encompassing transformations as in AfricanAmerican history. The Civil Rights Movement changed the way scholars have written about slavery, but the broad wake created by that revolution in the history of the "peculiar institution" has struck every other facet of African-American history as well. During the 1970s, even as scholars penned now-classic works on the plantation South in the antebellum era, the margins of the institution fell open to detailed investigation. In no instance was this more the case than with the free African Americans who lived in the states outside of the slave South. Since the late 1960s and early 1970s, dozens upon dozens of books and hundreds of journal articles have appeared that seek to understand the significance of those who lived, as Leon Litwack put it, "North of slavery."' In 1860, 226,000 (forty-seven percent) of the nation's 478,000 free blacks lived in free states, and thus totaled over five percent of the black population in America. Though oppressed by popular prejudice and a range of legal and institutional constraints--in 1847, blacks at a convention labeled themselves "slaves of the community"African Americans outside the South wielded significance far beyond their meager numbers. Urban and often literate, some lived in states where they could vote while others commanded considerable wealth. More importantly, all possessed