More than Freedom

When two Georgia slave catchers arrived in Boston in October 1850 in search of William Craft and Ellen Craft, who had escaped almost two years earlier, they were relatively confident they would nab their prey. After all, Congress had recently enacted the most draconian fugitive slave law, which disrupted the lives of many in northern black communities. But the Georgians had miscalculated terribly; within days they were forced to flee the city empty-handed. Boston's black community, aided by its white allies, had lived up to its reputation as a place where fugitive slaves were safe. This relatively small community, no more than 2 percent of the city's population, had developed the institutions and organizations—churches, fraternities, antislavery societies, and Masonic lodges, among others—and a leadership cadre, Stephen Kantrowitz shows, deeply committed to protecting their community and taking their rightful place as full-fledged citizens. More than Freedom is an in-depth study of this community from its emergence as a small leadership group in the late 1820s to the passing of the antebellum generation sixty years later. Using a “narrow foothold on Beacon Hill,” they first imagined and then fought for a United States in which they were fully endowed with all the rights of citizenship, or as Kantrowitz put it, struggled “to write themselves into the national narratives of democracy and fraternity” (pp. 4, 5). It was a citizenship first practiced within the walls of their own community that later reached out to African Americans in other areas of the free states, then to the enslaved and across the racial divide, constructed, as it was, on the principles of universal brotherhood. Victory against slavery and racism, these activists believed, required the support of equally committed white allies, for citizenship, Kantrowitz insists, was a “matter not only of law but love” and a “fuller belonging” in both their “communities and in the nation” (pp. 33, 50

Abolitionism · Archaeology · Art · Citizenship · Craft · Democracy · Fraternity · Narrative · Political science · Politics · Population · Reputation · Sociology · White (mutation · White supremacy · Demography · Gender Studies · History · Law · Race, History, and American Society