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The Search for Freedom

This chapter assesses the work of the abolitionist movement in New York. Throughout this turbulent period, roughly between the Great Fire and the Civil War, African Americans in New York both embraced freedom and lived in constant fear that they would be captured and sent to plantations in the south. Yet by the mid-1850s, the nation lacked any clear consensus on what to do about slavery. Colonization—the sending of Blacks back to Africa—seemed to some like a desirable solution. However, African American leaders like Thomas Downing and Dr. James McCune Smith dubbed the colonization society “a gigantic fraud,” and roundly denounced as unconstitutional the appropriation of money to the organization. In the early 1830s abolitionist societies calling for an end to the institution of slavery flourished in New York and across parts of the country. Even so, despite increasing opposition to slavery, it continued to grow and abolitionists such as Arthur and Lewis Tappan endured regular attacks. For whatever their position on slavery, many Americans feared the mixing of the races, a belief which would have disastrous consequences. The July 1834 Anti-Abolitionists riots that rocked the city were the outward sign of the violent forces growing in society, forces that would only increase in intensity over the next quarter of a century.