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Prince Hall, a black veteran of the American Revolution, was insulted and disappointed but probably not surprised when white officials refused his offer of help. He had volunteered a troop of 700 Boston area blacks to help quell a rebellion of western Massachusetts farmers led by Daniel Shays during the economic turmoil in the uncertain period following independence. Many African Americans had fought for America’s liberty and their own in the Revolution, but their place in the new nation was unresolved. As slavery was abolished in the North, free blacks gained greater opportunities, but still faced a long struggle against limits to their freedom, against discrimination, and against southern slavery. The lives of these men and women are vividly described in In Hope of Liberty, spanning the 200 years and eight generations from the colonial slave trade to the Civil War. In this marvelously peopled history, James and Lois Horton introduce us to a rich cast of characters. There are familiar historical figures such as Crispus Attucks, a leader of the Boston Massacre and one of the first casualties of the American Revolution; Sojourner Truth, former slave and eloquent antislavery and women’s rights activist whose own family had been broken by slavery when her son became a wedding present for her owner’s daughter; and Prince Whipple, George Washington’s aide, easily recognizable in the portrait of Washington crossing the Delaware River. And there are the countless men and women who struggled to lead their daily lives with courage and dignity: Zilpha Elaw, a visionary revivalist who preached before crowds of thousands; David James Peck, the first black to graduate from an American medical school in 1848; Paul Cuffe, a successful seafaring merchant who became an ardent supporter of the black African colonization movement; and Nancy Prince, at eighteen the effective head of a scattered household of four siblings, each boarded in different homes, who at twenty-five was formally presented to the Russian court. In a seamless narrative weaving together all these stories and more, the Hortons describe the complex networks, both formal and informal, that made up free black society, from the black churches, which provided a sense of community and served as a training ground for black leaders and political action, to the countless newspapers which spoke eloquently of their aspirations for blacks and played an active role in the antislavery movement, to the informal networks which allowed far-flung families to maintain contact, and which provided support and aid to needy members of the free black community and to fugitives from the South. Finally, they describe the vital role of the black family, the cornerstone of this variegated and tightly knit community In Hope of Liberty brilliantly illuminates the free black communities of the antebellum North as they struggled to reconcile conflicting cultural identities and to work for social change in an atmosphere of racial injustice. As the black community today still struggles with many of the same problems, this insightful history reminds us how far we have come, and how far we have yet to go.

The American Revolution began the abolition of slavery in the North, transforming the operation and meaning of class and race. A growing racial divide at the bottom of society can be traced through the institution of racially defined political statuses, violent racial conflicts, labor competition, the systematic exclusion of blacks from certain occupations, and the development of an ideology of racial inferiority.

Horton reviews Freedom Bound: The Underground Railroad in Lycoming County, PA at http://www.lycoming.edu/underground/ by Lynn Estomin, Lycoming College.

In “The Man and the Martyr: Abraham Lincoln in African American History and Memory”, James Oliver Horton and Lois E. Horton sketch the evolving evaluations of the sixteenth president by such diverse black persons as H. Ford Douglas, Frederick Douglass, John Rock, Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth, Elizabeth Keckley, Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. Du Bois, Martin Luther King Jr., and Lerone Bennett. Prior to issuing his final Emancipation Proclamation, men and women of color generally judged Lincoln “a conservative antislavery man,” who favored gradually emancipating the South's slaves, repatriating them abroad, and compensating their owners.

On April 14, 1876, a crowd gathered on the east side of Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., to witness the unveiling of the Freedmen’s Memorial dedicated to the memory of Abraham Lincoln and his role in Black freedom. President Ulysses S. Grant, his cabinet members, justices of the Supreme Court, the Japanese minister, and other distinguished guests were arrayed behind the speaker’s stand, and the marine band opened the proceedings with a rendition of “Hail Columbia.” With Professor John Mercer Langston presiding, African Methodist Episcopal bishop John M. Brown offered a prayer and the Honorable J. Henri Burch of Louisiana

Central to the development of the American legal system, writes Professor Finkelman in Slavery & the Law, is the institution of slavery. It informs us not only about early concepts of race and property, but about the nature of American democracy itself. Prominent historians of slavery and legal scholars analyze the intricate relationship between slavery, race, and the law from the earliest Black Codes in colonial America to the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law and the Dred Scott decision prior to the Civil War. Slavery & the Law's wide-ranging essays focus on comparative slave law, auctioneering practices, rules of evidence, and property rights, as well as issues of criminality, punishment, and constitutional law. What emerges from this multi-faceted portrait is a complex legal system designed to ensure the property rights of slave-holders and to institutionalize racism. The ultimate result was to strengthen the institution of slavery in the midst of a growing trend toward democracy in the mid-nineteenth-century Atlantic community.