Editor’s Note: In July, 2024, The University of Pennsylvania Press published Sarah Gronningsater’s The Rising Generation: Gradual Abolition, Black Legal Culture, and the Making of National Freedom, which won the 2025 James A. Rawley Prize and earned an Honorable Mention for the Frederick Jackson Turner Award, both from The Organization of American Historians. Recently, Gronningsater discussed her book with The Docket. Here is our conversation.
The Docket [TD]: The Rising Generation is an ambitious book that speaks to the legacy of the American Revolution, the actual operation of gradual abolition laws, and most importantly to the lived experiences of people who seized their own freedom. It’s a history of emancipation in New York State that also explores the long story of American emancipation across centuries. The stories you tell are rich with incredible detail. Can you walk us through how you managed to do all of the research that informs these stories?
Sarah Gronningsater [SG]:Thank you for inviting me to contribute to The Docket!
The simplest and perhaps boring answer to this question is: time. I think all of us writing legal history are aware that we are on various clocks. Scholarship can take years, and yet we are also under pressure to finish things—to notch a publication, to complete a degree, to achieve tenure. And ideally, do the rest of human life in the meantime! I did my doctorate at the University of Chicago, and in hindsight, I really appreciate that I didn’t feel too rushed. Like many things, it’s a balance! My dissertation was long and unwieldy and over-stuffed, with miles of footnotes in desperate need of taming, but this was partly because I had been given the space to spend untold hours in archives across New York State, with funding and fellowships, to collect evidence. I’m really grateful for that.
At the same time that I was interested in the seemingly small and everyday, I discovered in the research that—put together, in a mosaic-like way—what ordinary people did to protect their freedom, to make better lives for their families, to build schools, and to confirm their citizenship very much mattered to the bigger political and legal stories we see on the state and national stages. If the book succeeds in its argument, this means that I can convince readers that what a generation of remarkable black New Yorkers did in their daily lives influenced the way that emancipation, citizenship, and constitutional transformation occurred over the course of the long nineteenth century. As the title of the book suggests, these children and their parents were instrumental in forging a new national freedom. That freedom wasn’t perfect, but it surely mattered. It’s not the only story of how we get to the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments and federal civil rights legislation in the 1860s and 70s, but I think the people in The Rising Generation should be considered protagonists in our broader narrative. Black people born during the nation’s first emancipation, in this case in the powerful northern state that had been the closest to a “slave society” in the colonial era, shaped the more famous emancipation of the Civil War era.
The last chapters of the book treat the 1850s-80s, and my source base there was somewhat different. Nearly a decade after I finished my dissertation, I found some incredible letters from adult members of the rising generation—African American men now in their 50s and 60s—in the Charles Sumner papers at Harvard, about the push for the 1875 Civil Rights Act. One of the most exciting finds, and one that helped me shore up the larger argument of the book, was listed in the microfilm finding aid as an 1873 letter from “Clrd Citizens/NY.” More famous people, like Frederick Douglass, were listed by individual name. But those “Clrd Citizens/NY” turned out to be Charles Reason, Peter S. Porter, and William P. Powell, Sr. These three were longtime civil rights leaders in New York; Reason was the nation’s first black college professor. Without ample time, it’s hard to find sources like this. I am thankful for the time, and I hope readers are convinced that the book hangs together, start to finish.
TD:Of course, New York City is the crucial venue for the story of the rising generation. How do you think the city itself influenced the lives of the children of gradual abolition?
SG: Well, one thing about cities, and perhaps this was even more true two hundred years ago, is how they lend to certain forms of interaction and communication. And New York City in the early republic was still concentrated on the lower part of Manhattan Island. People were close to each other, walking distance from each other. This mattered for several reasons. The records of the New York Manumission Society, as well as local court records lodged at the Municipal Archives, show how utterly vulnerable enslaved and free black children were. At the same time, these records show how various parents, adults, and peers sometimes managed to keep an eye on and help these children. When a child was being beaten, or threatened with kidnapping, or denied some right (and the children technically born free under New York graduation abolition laws did have access to some specific rights, often based on English common law rights related to servant and pauper status), a concerned neighbor might hear this and intervene, or get word to a parent who was being forced to work elsewhere. In other words, the proximity created by cities affected children’s social ties and access to legal protection. Many children slipped through the cracks in so many ways. But hundreds reached antislavery lawyers, politicians, Quakers, judges, and lawmakers. All of these children affected the course and progress of emancipation, including through improved state laws and growing political interest in antislavery.[1]
The city setting also greatly mattered to education. This was a rather literate generation. The Manumission Society operated six schools by the 1820s; there were also long-standing private schools operated by black teachers. Walking to a nearby school was possible for many children. This educational geography mattered to their inter-generational relationships as well as to their political and legal capacities, awakenings, and socialization.
But I want to stress something. Roughly 80% of people of African descent in New York State in the late 1700s/early 1800s lived outside of New York City. This fact is crucial in the book. We can’t tell the whole story of gradual abolition, the fight for equal citizenship, and the state-within-the-national story without getting outside the Big City. And while children in rural areas experienced emancipation similarly to their urban counterparts in some ways, their realities could also be quite different. It’s horrible but important to think about: what of all the rural slave and servant children susceptible to household violence by white masters whose cries couldn’t be heard by nearby neighbors? And even though, by 1810, there was an updated state gradual abolition law mandating that the children of this generation receive a basic education, including at local common schools, this wasn’t always so easy in rural areas. Or, if a child were kidnapped and illegally taken out of state, that child’s disappearance might be less obvious in a rural area. All that said, what is also clear is that by the time New York was an (imperfectly) free state by the 1830s and beyond, black citizens—the grown-up children of gradual abolition—across the state had built homes, communities, churches, schools, societies, and political movements.
TD: Let’s geek out about historiography for a moment. Can you describe a couple of books or articles that were particularly helpful for you as you tried to piece together the story of the children of gradual abolition.
There are so many! But maybe one simple way to answer this is to go back to the very early stages of the project and cite Leslie Harris’s In the Shadow of Slavery: African Americans in New York City, 1626-1863 (2003)and Shane White’s Somewhat More Independent: The End of Slavery in New York City (1991). Both of these books are tremendously well-researched. White’s demographic evidence, and the way he charted the day-to-day changes in slavery during the early phases of gradual abolition, across a range of sources, is extraordinary. It’s a methodological feat. Harris captured African American social life across an incredible *two and a half* centuries of New York City history. I was constantly taking Harris’s book off the shelf, both as a reference and as a source of careful analysis of various people, institutions, and events.
The best part is, I ended up meeting both Harris and White along the way. There is that saying, “never meet your heroes.” Not true in this case! Both Leslie and Shane—I think I can call them by first names, now!—have been tremendously generous and encouraging. A few years ago, Mae Ngai, as part of the “Mapping Historical New York” project, managed to get Leslie, Shane, and me all in the same room for a day to talk about African American history and geography in New York City. That was one of my favorite inside-baseball moments of historical discussion.
TD: The last question is a fun one: what are some of your favorite places in New York?
SG: Well! Just as I do in my book, I want to get people outside of New York City, though the city is undeniably an important place, then and now.
I think the Hudson River Valley—and it’s a big valley—is remarkably beautiful. And it’s dotted with historical societies and old properties. There has been considerable effort in recent years to tell the story of slavery and African American history in these places. Historic Huguenot Street in New Paltz is great (and has amazing archival material). Philipsburg Manor in Sleepy Hollow. The John Jay Homestead in Bedford. There is too much to list here! I also love the Adirondacks. The hiking is otherworldly. This northern and mountainous part of the state is also important to the history of black New York because it’s the area where Gerrit Smith donated large tracks of land to black men to help them gain access to the vote—New York after 1821 had a racialized property requirement in its constitution. John Brown was in the mix of this experiment. The John Brown homestead, just outside of Lake Placid, is worth the trip. They do amazing public programming about African American and antislavery history.
[1] Speaking of rising generations, I just read an incredible undergraduate history thesis, by Zachary Vanderslice of Columbia, that delves into the details of kidnapping and illegal exportation. It includes some painstaking and revealing quantitative work. See Zachary Vanderslice, “Slavery in the Midst of Freedom: Black New York and the Illicit Slave Trade, 1799-1827,” Senior Thesis, History Department, Columbia University, 2025.