Following the abolition of slavery in New England, white citizens seemed to forget that it had ever existed there. Drawing on a wide array of primary sources--from slaveowners' diaries to children's daybooks to racist broadsides--Joanne Pope Melish reveals not only how northern society changed but how its perceptions changed as well.
Melish explores the origins of racial thinking and practices to show how ill-prepared the region was to accept a population of free people of color in its midst. Because emancipation was gradual, whites transferred prejudices shaped by slavery to their relations with free people of color, and their attitudes were buttressed by abolitionist rhetoric which seemed to promise riddance of slaves as much as slavery. She tells how whites came to blame the impoverished condition of people of color on their innate inferiority, how racialization became an important component of New England ante-bellum nationalism, and how former slaves actively participated in this discourse by emphasizing their African identity.
Placing race at the center of New England history, Melish contends that slavery was important not only as a labor system but also as an institutionalized set of relations. The collective amnesia about local slavery's existence became a significant component of New England regional identity.
Reviews
"Melish's work is original, important . . . a fascinating work that opens new interpretations of emancipation and race in New England."--William and Mary Quarterly
"[F]ascinating. . . . Disowning Slavery brims with ideas: it is an exciting and argumentative book."--Journal of American History
"Melish's book makes an important contribution to the literature on slavery and abolition and fills a significant gap in our understanding of how slavery in New England affected both that region and the nation. . . . Melish's book takes the reader through the process by which white New Englanders, through their responses to slavery, emancipation, and black people, created the myth of themselves and their region as free and white. Melish's angle of vision and her argument are both fresh, and she offers new insights and raises new questions about how the end of slavery led to a new construction of race in North America. This is a terrific book, one that all scholars of slavery, abolition, and the early republic absolutely must read."--H-Net Reviews
"Melish has written a really important book. . . . Painstakingly researched, filled with new information and astute analysis, this book is a major contribution to our knowledge of New England slavery and a valuable addition to the understanding of race relations in the United States."--Edgar J. McManus, City University of New York. American Historical Review. October, 2000.
"Melish's searching analysis compels a reconsideration of many aspects of the conventional narrative of antislavery within both white and African-American communities. . . . This is an important book, one that commands a reconsideration of many of our assumptions about the meaning of emancipation, the development of racial ideologies, and also about antislavery itself."--Margaret M.R. Kellow, Reviews in American History. December, 1999.
"Abolition took so long in the North because most states bowed to the interests of northern slaveholders and moved to end slavery only gradually. . . . Disowning Slavery adds significant new dimensions to this emerging picture and makes it possible to begin to see it whole. . . . This is a very important book that adds immeasurably to our understanding of slavery and gradual emancipation in the North during the first half of the nineteenth century...[The work] is an invaluable contribution to the emerging picture of slavery and emancipation in the American North. Pope Melish has made it difficult for New Englanders ever to see their history quite the same way again."--Law and History Review. Summer 2000.
"Fifteen years in the making, this is an unusually mature and finished first book. It is also a major contribution to the study of the construction of American national identity. . . . The volume's most important contribution is to uncover and analyze the process by which white New Englander's after 1820 succeeded in constructing "a triumphant narrative of a historically free, white New England in which a few people of color were unaccountably marooned." . . . provide[s] a rich analysis of the dynamics of race relations in pre-Civil War New England, Melish has made a promising entry onto the stage of American historical writing."--Jack P. Greene, Johns Hopkins University. The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 7/2000.
"In this ambitious and often compelling study, Joanne Pope Melish seeks to explore in detail, and then to reconfigure, our sense of the meaning of 'gradual' emancipation in New England. . . . Her relentless vision of New England Americans 'disowning' the enslaved history, and displacing it on the South, illuminates in a new and important way the history of race and regionalism that we must rethink again."--Steven M. Stowe, Indiana University. Journal of Southern History, Vol. 67, No. 3, August 2001
"One of the many important insights of Joanne Pope Melish's extraordinary new book, Disowning Slavery, is its assertion that collective forgetting, in this case New England's aggregate amnesia about its own dark experience with chattel slavery and gradual emancipation, was an equally potent element in the shaping of the region's self-image. . . . Melish's determination to put the history of local slavery at the core of New England racial attitudes has produced a highly nuanced picture of the gradual emancipation process that goes well beyond anything of its kind. . . . [A] tremendous achievement that will have an impact across a wide historiographical spectrum. Beyond its contributions to the history of slavery, race, and New England identity, the book holds special appeal for students of Connecticut history. . . . While Disowning Slavery is not specifically a work of Connecticut history, it is a work that Connecticut historians cannot do without."--Paul E. Teed, Saginaw Valley State University. Connecticut History, Vol. 39, no. 2
"[O]n the basis of her impressive mastery of a broad range of recent scholarship and thorough research in local records that reveal much about the poor and disenfranchised, Melish examines slavery, the ideological construction of race, and how memories of the past conform to the perceived necessities of the present. This is a full and complex book."--Donald R. Wright, SUNY - Cortland. Journal of American Ethnic History.
"This book will be of particular interest to people trying to understand African emancipation in the British Isles as much as in America. . . . This book . . . contributes to our understanding of how slavery and race intersect in North America."--Fabian Tompsett, BASA Newletter 30, April 2001
"In this wonderfully observed history, Melish's keen truth-giving shows a new picture of the past, in turn giving us a different perspective on the turbulent race relations of our country today."--Providence Sunday Journal
"Since New England was the first section to abolish slavery, a process that began as early as 1780, it could and did claim to be the most 'American' section. A sectional ideology soon developed of New England as a land of liberty, anti-slavery, steady habits, moral superiority, and commerce. The prior existence of slavery was either denied or played down as brief and mild. . . . Melish argues that this was simply not true. New England's experience with slavery was long, deep, and brutal."—Donald W. Livingston, Southern Partisan
“Joanne Melish sheds more fresh light on the significance of slavery in the North than any other historian I can think of. Disowning Slavery is a brilliant book.”--David Brion Davis, author of The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution
“Disowning Slavery impressively roots the development of white racial ideology in the antebellum North both in an expansive New England nationalism and in the day-to-day experience of gradual emancipation. An important addition to the literature on race relations and on sectionalism in the U.S.”--David Roediger, University of Minnesota
