David Center for the American Revolution Seminar: "The New Jersey Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery: A Reappraisal,” with Jonathan Sassi

3:00 - 5:00 p.m. EDT

Register online via Zoom.

March 24, 2021

3:00 - 5:00 p.m. EDT

sassi

The David Center for the American Revolution Seminar Series will launch on Wednesday, March 24, 2021 at 3:00 p.m. on Zoom.

The speaker will be Dr. Jonathan Sassi. Dr. Sassi is professor of history at the College of Staten Island, CUNY, and a faculty member of the Ph.D. program in history at the CUNY Graduate Center. A historian of Revolutionary America and the early republic, his research has focused on the intersection of religion, politics, and reform between about 1740 and 1840. He is currently working on a book-length study of the roughly fifty-year struggle that culminated in the passage of New Jersey's gradual abolition act of 1804.

Dr. Sassi will be presenting a chapter titled "The New Jersey Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery: A Reappraisal.”

A description of the paper is below. The paper will be pre-circulated to registered participants in advance of the seminar meeting.

To attend the seminar and to receive a copy of the paper, please register via Zoom

The David Center for the American Revolution Seminar serves as a forum for works-in-progress that explore topics in the era of the American Revolution (1750-1820). Questions about the series may be directed to Adrianna Link, Head of Scholarly Programs, at [email protected].


"The New Jersey Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery: A Reappraisal”

The New Jersey Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery was active for a little more than a decade after its founding in 1793, and to the extent that historians have considered the society at all, they have long been dismissive toward it.  I am working on a book-length study about the abolition movement in eighteenth-century New Jersey, and this paper is drawn from a chapter that seeks to provide a more nuanced view of the societys successes and failures.  The paper examines over fifty cases in which the society aided African Americans suspected of being illegally held in bondage, including instances of kidnapping, fraudulent indentures, or free-born children being claimed as slaves.  African Americans reached out for help to the society, which brought to bear an array of social, financial, and legal resources.  Slaveholders, however, fought back with their own strategies of resistance and evasion, which, even if ultimately unsuccessful, raised the costs for abolitionists and prevented them from accomplishing more.