From Class to Race: Gradual Emancipation and Northern Racial Reconstruction
Lois E. Horton
George Mason University
The gradual end to slavery in the North after the American Revolution brought
an ambiguous black freedom, emancipating only some of the 55,000 slaves
and their children. In colonial America, social and political life
had been divided by both class and race, as the multiracial lower classes
worked, played, and engaged in political action together. The expanding
democracy in the new nation granted more political rights to unpropertied
white men but often limited the rights of blacks. At the same time,
fading slavery and the long-term black indentures of gradual emancipation
brought still unfree African Americans into direct competition with white
wage workers, increasing racial antagonisms. Thus, by the Jacksonian
era, race became more important to the organization of the social and political
lives of northern workers.