North of Slavery: the Negro in the Free States, 1790-1860

Despite the wealth of literature on the Negro and slavery, the northern Negro has remained almost the forgotten man in historical research. At long last, this subject has been attacked by Leon Litwack in his book, North of Slavery. The author attempts in eight chapters to survey the life of the Negro in the North from his rise to freedom to his condition on the eve of the Civil War. The book begins with a chapter on the extinction of slavery in the North and concludes with a study of the Negro's position during the 1850's. Other chapters deal with the attitude of the federal government toward the free Negro, his economic, social, and political status in the free states, and his efforts to win equality in these areas. This book paints a bleak picture of the North as a haven for the Negro. Discrimination followed him from the cradle to the grave. He found it at school, church, courtroom, polls, work, and even at the abolition society. Political disfranchisement, economic discrimination, segregation in education, and social ostracism was the lot of the Negro in the North. Where laws failed to accomplish this end, custom and prejudice produced the same result. Pronouncements from the free states on the capacity of the Negro differed little from proslavery arguments voiced in the South. Color lines divided even the abolition societies. Although willing to improve the economic and political position of the Negro, white abolitionists often refused him social equality. The author also suggests that attention devoted to such men as William Lloyd Garrison, Wendell Phillips, and Theodore Weld has obscured the importance of the Negro abolitionist.