Stephen Kantrowitz’s More Than Freedom: Fighting for Black Citizenship in a White Republic, 1829-1889 examines black activism in Boston from the Reform Era past the end of Reconstruction. Kantrowitz asks what role black activists played in the abolition movement, the Civil War, and Reconstruction and how far-reaching of an impact they had. He draws upon social history and political history in order to do this.
Kantrowitz argues, “The ‘colored citizens’ failed to remake the nation in the way they had hoped, but…they nonetheless left it forever changed. Without them, white abolitionists would have remained abstracted idealists or cautious gradualists, and fugitives would have had no safe resting place south of the Canadian border…Without them, in other words, the Civil War might not have come, freedom could not have meant what it did, and Reconstruction’s unfinished revolution would scarcely have begun.” Kantrowitz does this by following the stories of antislave activists such as Frederick Douglass, Lewis Hayden, William Cooper Nell, John Rock, and David Walker. Kantrowitz organizes his argument into three parts. Unlike previous historians, Kantrowitz identifies these figures as activists in order to avoid limiting their cause to abolition and to show how they continued to agitate after the Civil War. The first focuses on abolition movements from the 1830s to the 1850s. The second addresses violence against the Fugitive Slave Act through the Civil War. The final section focuses on Reconstruction through the 1880s. Kantrowitz identifies the concept of the “colored citizen” as the driving force during abolition. In a time when black American’s legal citizenship was unclear, antislave activists carved out a social place wherein they could articulate a goal of full citizenship. Despite debates over class and gender, the movement broadly focused on creating and maintaining this ideal. Kantrowitz argues that, following the passage of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act, “black activists’ forcible efforts to free fugitives from federal custody, their threats against slave catchers, and their well-organized networks of fugitive aid did not make the Civil War inevitable, but they were critical factors in the growing regional polarization about the meaning of slavery and the nature of slaveholders’ power.” This continues through the Civil War when black activists refused to serve unless they could do so as equals to white soldiers and as military and government officials debated the fate of the South’s slaves. In his final section, Kantrowitz follows the activists’ struggle for suffrage and equality in politics and commerce. He closes with an examination of the activists’ legacy, writing, “Their victory was real: the liberal freedom won by slaves and free blacks during the 1860s represented a momentous transformation in the formal character of the United States.” He warns the reader than work remains for full equality.
Kantrowitz builds on the work of Peter Hinks and had Walter Johnson’s assistance while working on the manuscript. He also title-drops Eric Foner in his introduction, setting this book in the larger historiography of Reconstruction. Kantrowitz draws upon “letters, newspapers, pamphlets, diaries, proceedings, and reminiscences” of both white and black activists living in Boston and their associates around the country. He freely admits that these do not represent the activist or abolitionist stance of other Northern cities or the country at large, but argues that the centrality of these activists to regional and national events makes up for that drawback.
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