A historian’s look at abolition and citizenship

Historian Sarah Gronningsater’s new book, about efforts toward slavery’s abolition and equal rights in New York from the Revolution through Reconstruction, shows how Black people found ways to advocate for their freedom—and helped mold a new nation.

In the late 1700s, New York and four other northern states passed laws that freed children born to enslaved women. Sarah Gronningsater, an assistant professor of history in Penn’s School of Arts & Sciences, wanted to know more about how this extraordinary situation affected those children. A former high school teacher, she’s always been interested in how young people make their way in the world and grow to understand their adult purpose.

Gronningsater concentrated on New York, the most economically and politically powerful northern state in the young nation, spending years seeking out published and unpublished sources. That effort resulted in her book, “The Rising Generation: Gradual Abolition, Black Legal Culture, and the Making of National Freedom.” It tells the story of how Black people—both enslaved and free—found ways to protect and nurture these children using the laws and politics of their state, and how “this rising generation” of children eventually changed the United States itself.

Sarah Gronningsater and the cover of her book, “The Rising Generation.” — (Image: Courtesy CalTech/*Omnia*)

When Abraham Lincoln finally issued the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, “Black abolitionists are loud and clear about what they want freedom to look like,” Gronningsater says. “They start writing Congressmen. They work every connection they have. They argue passionately in newspaper editorials, they create interstate equal rights leagues with free Black people from across the North, and they start pushing the federal government to create a situation in which equality before the law will be real.”

Jim Crow laws rolled back many of the achievements of the 1860s and ’70s, yet even so, this generation of Black Northerners made real progress. It’s a notion Gronningsater says she wants readers to understand. “The history of abolition in the North is not as well known, and I wanted to show how seriously the Black population across New York state took their newfound free citizenship,” she says. “The story of 19th-century democracy and party politics writ large, to me, has to also be a story of these free Black people in the American North.”