Standard-Bearers of Equality : America?s First Abolition Movement

Polgar, Paul J.

ISBN 10: 1469653931 / ISBN 13: 9781469653938

Published by Omohundro Institute and UNC Press, 2019

About this Item

Unread book in perfect condition.

Seller Inventory # 35558978

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Standard-Bearers of Equality : America?s First Abolition Movement
• Publisher: Omohundro Institute and UNC Press
• Publication Date: 2019
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1469653931
• ISBN 13: 9781469653938
• Binding: Hardcover
• Condition: As New

About this title

Synopsis

Paul Polgar recovers the racially inclusive vision of America’s first abolition movement. In showcasing the activities of the Pennsylvania Abolition Society, the New York Manumission Society, and their African American allies during the post-Revolutionary and early national eras, he unearths this coalition’s comprehensive agenda for black freedom and equality. By guarding and expanding the rights of people of African descent and demonstrating that black Americans could become virtuous citizens of the new Republic, these activists, whom Polgar names “first movement abolitionists,” sought to end white prejudice and eliminate racial inequality. Beginning in the 1820s, however, colonization threatened to eclipse this racially inclusive movement. Colonizationists claimed that what they saw as permanent black inferiority and unconquerable white prejudice meant that slavery could end only if those freed were exiled from the United States. In pulling many reformers into their orbit, this radically different antislavery movement marginalized the activism of America’s first abolitionists and obscured the racially progressive origins of American abolitionism that Polgar now recaptures.

By reinterpreting the early history of American antislavery, Polgar illustrates that the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries are as integral to histories of race, rights, and reform in the United States as the mid-nineteenth century.

About the Author

Paul J. Polgar is lecturer in history at Tufts University.