The Failed Promise: Reconstruction, Frederick Douglass, and the Impeachment of Andrew Johnson

Abstract

self-emancipators – of the Upper South, the inertia and racism of a complacent white majority worked to slow and qualify the trajectory toward freedom in Pennsylvania. Tomek’s fifth and sixth chapters cover the era of the early republic. Chapter 5, one of her longer chapters titled ‘The First Reconstruction,’ deals with a long post-revolutionary northern reconstruction, emerging in recent literature as counterpoint to a short post-Civil War southern Reconstruction. White Pennsylvanians were not really ready to end the benefits of slavery and accept African Americans as fellow citizens, and the legal structure of gradual abolition required the slow arduous work of the PAS to defend black rights. Chapter 6 breaks some new ground in describing the work of antislavery emissaries from Pennsylvania in proselytizing for abolition around a relatively fluid early republic. One of the particularly eye-opening stories is that of the role of Warner Mifflin and other Pennsylvanians in the 1782 passage of Virginia’s manumission act. Readers may be more familiar with the involvement of Pennsylvanians later in the period in the founding and development of the American Colonization Society, the subject of Tomek’s first book, Colonization and Its Discontents: Emancipation, Emigration, and Antislavery in Antebellum Pennsylvania. (New York University Press, 2011). Tomek’s final two chapters carry us through the rise of immediatism to the Civil War and Reconstruction. Her discussion of the immediatists reviews familiar ground rooted in a now long pattern of ambiguities. Radical Quakers created a space for women and African Americans, but were too radical for the majority of white society, culminating in the horrific blow of the burning of Pennsylvania Hall in 1838, and the division of the movement the following year. Chapter 7 ends with a quick account of the emergence of the vigilance committees, the Underground Railroad, and the Christiana Riot. Chapter 8 moves briskly through the Civil War recruitment of African American regiments, and the struggles over voting rights, streetcar access and education during the Reconstruction years. Here one wonders whether Tomek fades with the immediatists, as they retreat in the late 1830s. Her coverage of the 1840s to the 1870s seems thinner than that of the 1760s to the1830s, perhaps reflecting the wider historiographical divide between the histories of abolitionism and those of political antislavery, war, and Reconstruction. Manisha Sinha has divided the history of abolitionism into first and second waves; one wonders whether we need to put a third wave on an equal footing. But these ruminations aside, Tomek has given us an excellent overview of an important story.