In Search of Abolitionist Modernity
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During the early 1880s, veteran abolitionist agitator Oliver Johnson and veteran Republican operative George W. Julian publicly debated the origins of modern abolitionism. The precise founder of the immediate emancipation campaign preoccupied each activist-turned-historian in a rhetorical boxing match that initially played out on the pages of a monthly magazine. Julian delivered a revisionist first blow, by contending that Charles Osborn, a relatively obscure Quaker whose reformism had taken place in Tennessee, Ohio, and Indiana, effectively discovered the doctrine of immediatism in 1814, well before William Lloyd Garrison or anyone else in the United States promulgated it starting in the 1830s. In a counterpunch, Johnson dismissed Osborn's purportedly pioneering antislavery standing. For that devout Garrisonian, a new and revolutionary phase of antislavery agitation materialized in 1831 solely, when his lifelong friend and humanitarian collaborator had launched the Bostonbased newspaper, The Liberator.1
Regardless of what those pugilists claimed, as well as which one possibly prevailed, the dispute itself has generally persisted, in some form, among scholars up to the present day. In Standard-Bearers of Equality, however, Paul J. Polgar moves beyond any single individual in order to pinpoint the essence of antislavery radicalism or unearth the roots or abolitionist modernity. Rather, he focuses on organizations on behalf of a larger claim that racial progressivism, an ostensible hallmark of the post-1830 crusade against slavery, actually arose in the late-eighteenth century with the formation and advancement of two gradual emancipation groups: the Pennsylvania Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery, for the Relief of Free Negroes Unlawfully Held in Bondage, and for Improving the Condition of the African Race, better known as the Pennsylvania Abolition Society (PAS); and the New-York Society for Promoting the Manumission of Slaves, and Protecting Such of Them as Have [End Page 214] Been, or May Be Liberated, more simply known as the New-York Manumission Society (NYMS).
Since the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s and the unofficial, neo-abolitionist school of historiography that stemmed from it, research on abolitionism in the United States has largely revolved about the immediatist, second-wave activism that flourished from 1831 to 1865. In a 1969 survey of the field, Merton L. Dillon ascribed the scholarly neglect of the gradualist first wave of the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries to the fact that, "for most historians[,] the accomplishments of the earlier periods apparently seemed too few, the personalities too obscure, and the issues too uncompelling to attract their interest." In a stimulating essay that surfaced ten years later, Ronald G. Walters urged colleagues to broaden their horizons when studying the antislavery past, and deploy longer-view perspectives reaching as far backwards as the 1600s. To be sure, Polgar's monograph represents no extremely belated academic response to the overlapping concerns of Dillon and Walters. Intentional or not, it uniquely dovetails with them nevertheless.2
On a simple level, Standard-Bearers of Equality is but the latest addition in a slowly growing list of books partly or wholly dealing with gradual abolitionism. Polgar's study profits from such movement-oriented works as Richard S. Newman's The Transformation of American Abolitionism: Fighting Slavery in the Early Republic (2002); David N. Gellman's Emancipating New York: The Politics of Slavery and Freedom, 1777–1827 (2006); and Manisha Sinha's The Slave's Cause: A History of Abolition (2016). The author complicates and complements the findings of scholarly counterparts: problematizing Newman's depiction of a predominantly elitist, cautiously legalistic, and tradition-bound PAS; expanding on Gellman's treatment of the wide-ranging discursive strategies of a publicly engaged NYMS; and providing a case in point that backs Sinha's broader, cross-century and transatlantic portrayal of a distinctively radical, interracial struggle against human enslavement. By interacting with preexisting scholarship in those and other ways, Polgar demonstrates that abolitionists of the post-Revolutionary...
