Reviewed by the agency of Merton L.

Reviewed by the agency of Merton L. Dillon Ohio State University

Readers of a certain age will recognize that this splendid work probably would not have been published a generation ago, nor is it frequently more likely that anyone then would have pondering of preparing a book as it is as Witness for Freedom. In make liable matter and approach, this dutiful examination of African American participation in the antislavery emotion belongs to a new dispensation. Although we have become thoroughly familiar with the changed etho that makes similar works possible, the volume is recently made known enough and momentous enough to inspire prodigy and to deserve comment.

The tectonic shift in the two popular and scholarly understanding of African American history that first became evident after World War II is at now nearly complete. In chain of cause and effect most earlier portrayals of each aspect of the subject, however most conspicuously of slavery, have been discarded as at best wrong-headed, at worst malign. exposing to Ulrich B. Phillips's once-respect studies of slavery, for example, now are routinely preced by way of Surgeon General-like warnings of racist contaminants of which earlier readers were unaware.

The principal agents of this fathomless transformation were a handful of first-rate historians who, in the charged atmosphere of the incipient Civil Rights move approached their studies with assumptions altogether different from those of their predecessors. In the words of Kenneth M Stamp, the same of the earliest and perhaps the in the greatest degree influential proponent of the passing from hand to hand view, black "slaves were only ordinary human beings"; "... innately Negroe are, after all, sole white men with black skins, nothing more, nothing less" (The Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the Ante-Bellum South) However far not on the mark black separatists and examples of cultural diversity may find Stampp's formulation, it nonetheless set forthed the essence of a changed approach to African American history that betimes would become all but universal. It was a change that in appropriate course altered not only scholarship on the other hand public policy and private behavior as well.

Scholarly expression of the recently made known attitude appeared most conspicuously in studies of slavery. In a great reversal of interpretation, authoritative modern accounts portrayed slaves as creators and transmitters of a vibrant civilization rather than as vapid imitators of whites; slaves were robust and resistant rather than weak and passive, as Phillips had thinking and, unbeknownst to their masters, they had created a vital unless invisible slave community that shielded them from the chiefly hurtful effects of the inhumanity and violation incident to bondage.

Meanwhile, on the same level as publications reflecting the of the present day approach multiplied, scholars, in a strange lapse, left the lives of Northern emancipated blacks for the most part unattended. The principally celebrated work on the control Leon Litwack's North of Slavery, build them victims of a heartless body of discrimination and repression. The elucidation word here is victims. While the slave, it now was argued, had managed to crush the most serious effects of oppression, evidence that independent blacks in the North followed in doing the same thing was not forthcoming. Studies that argued otherwise were not many and late to appear.

But were Northern blacks really in the way that different from their Southern counterparts? Did Northern blacks resist their circumstances and find ways to save themselves, as their enslaved cohorts did, by the agency of becoming actors rather than entire subjects? Did they, too, by means of strength of will and character, subjugate the indignities and injustice which an unfeeling Northern white society inflicted? The important accomplishment of Witness for Freedom is to provide affirmative answers to these and related questions. Although the scholar who someday will write the much-need seamless history of African Americans - the same that bridges the Mason-Dixon line - has notwithstanding to appear, the present dimensions contains some of the material essential for that enterprise.

In the mid-1970s, Peter Ripley and his associates at Florida State University undertook a search for verbal expressions written by black abolitionists, the public who, naturally enough, lived in the North. If memory promotes I commented at the time that Ripley et al. had undertaken a search for hens' teeth I was unfit Through great industry and ingenuity, the Ripley team get backed some 14,000 letters, speeches, essays, pamphlets, and newspaper editorials located in 110 newspapers, many of them unintelligible and neglected, and in 200 libraries here and abroad. Subsequently these documents were made available in a seventeen-reel microfilm edition, and a generous selection was published in a five-volume series by means of the University of North Carolina Pres subject to consideration in this review is a sampling of the entire collection, fashioned to reveal the course of Northern black antislavery activities from 1817 to 1865 The selections reveal the advocacy of freedom and equality by the agency of a group of remarkable figures, African American women as well as men They also illustrate the outermost difficulties these persons faced forward account of the obstacles a repressive society place in their way. The documents also provide rare and enlightening glimpses of a Northern emancipated black community parallel in near respects to the now familiar Southern slave community; or, as the editors have it, the selections "reveal the filled sweep of African American life and civilization in antebellum America" (xviii).