BOOK REVIEW: Liberty’s Chain: Slavery, Abolition, and the Jay Family of New York by David N. Gellman (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2022) America’s Founders are routinely criticized for creating a republic that tolerated, and often defended, African slavery, but at least one of the Founders, New York’s John Jay, inaugurated a family tradition of anti-slavery […]
The American Revolution spurred the world’s first significant movement to abolish slavery and the African slave trade.[1] Before then, there was virtually no antislavery activity in any of the thirteen colonies of North America, or for that matter, anywhere else in the world. There was some limited antislavery dialogue in England, but its abolitionist movement […]
The American Revolution changed the way Americans viewed one of the world’s great tragedies: the African slave trade. The long march to end the slave trade and then slavery itself had to start somewhere, and a strong argument can be made that it started with the thirteen American colonies gaining independence from Great Britain, then […]
