Freedom by Degrees: Emancipation in Pennsylvania and Its Aftermath

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.

Review :
"Deserving of a prominent place beside the best of the southern volumes. Freedom By Degrees, based on a motherlode of documentation including probate and manumission records, abolitionist society papers, and runaway slave literature, masterfully delineates the forces that brought aout the gradual death of slavery in Pennsylvania and the subsequent transition to a semi-free black labor system....Cogent and sophisticated analysis."--Georgia Historical Quarterly "This is an important and stimulating study of slavery and abolition, resistance and reform in America."--Journal of Southern History "A valuable, thought-provoking study on the complex nature of emancipation in Pennsylvania."--New York History "A valuable, insightful work."--Pennsylvania History "The authors have produced a useful and revealing analysis. It aptly captures the ambiguities, half-steps, and uneven progress of the history of freedom in Early America."--The American Journal of Legal History "An important book, that continually brings to light interesting facets of the process by which slavery ended in this northern urban center and its rural surrounds....Everyone interested in either eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Pennsylvania or slavery in America should read this book and will do so with much profit."--Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography "This exploration of the emancipation process in the first state to pass an abolition act (in 1780) is the collaborative effort of two historians who have in previous excellent books stressed the narrow limits of abolitionism and the harrowing restrictions for freed blacks in eighteenth-century Pennsylvania. Nash and Soderland are to be congratulated for completing a very impressive trilogy of books that depict in an insightful fashion the character of abolitionism, emancipation, and black life in early Pennsylvania."--American National Review "Much of Nash and Soderlund's argument ultimately rests on the labor market conceptions that serve as a basis for understanding Pennsylvania's process and the broader meaning of emancipation. Their rich evidence and insightful approach deftly explore external and internal labor market forces while not using the terms of labor market analysis."--Labor History "[T]his is an important book, one that scholars of slavery and early Pennsylvania will read avidly and wish they had written."--Journal of Social History