The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition – By: Manisha Sinha

Reviewed By: Bill Stock

Interracial and multinational, legal and cultural, pragmatic and radical: this book traces the often-unappreciated history of the abolitionist movement in the United States.  From Roger Williams’ and William Penn’s unsuccessful attempts to bar slavery in the Rhode Island and Pennsylvania colonies in the Seventeenth Century to the passage of the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments in the Nineteenth, the history of slavery in the United States cannot be told without also including the history of those who opposed it.

In this book, you will read about a 1781 lawsuit in Massachusetts by an enslaved woman that led to the judicial abolition of slavery in that colony, and of the nearly 100-year controversy that divided the Pennsylvania Quakers until they expelled all remaining slaveholding members in 1774. For the next eighty years, free Blacks, along with men and women who had escaped slavery, led an interracial movement that stretched from the United States to Europe, the Caribbean and Africa. The movement progressively limited and eventually eliminated the international slave trade; freed enslaved persons and helped them escape to Free states and other countries; and protected Black men and women from legal kidnapping by agents of the slaveholding states acting under color of the Fugitive Slave Acts.  The abolitionists published papers, magazines, and books; held speeches and rallies; brought and defended lawsuits; and petitioned governments of every level to bring about an end to slavery in the United States. Their stories can inspire us in our own efforts to ensure all Americans equal dignity under the law.

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