Between Slavery and Freedom

Reviews / Votes

Winch describes how the end of institutionalized slavery and the freeing of African American slaves brought the United States closer to achieving true democracy. However, along with liberty for all came a widespread social inclination to redefine freedom and equality so the concepts could be applied differently depending on racial characteristics. These changing definitions were codified in social rules set in place to provide a constant reminder about race and about the places in society that the color of one's skin mandated for black and white people alike. The five chapters that comprise this brief book cover from the early years of Colonial America through emancipation and citizenship in the mid-19th century. The sections are followed by documents and portraits. Winch pokes and prods at the intangible space that lies between blacks and whites, freedom and liberty, and concludes that democracy cannot coexist with partiality. Verdict: History buffs, sociologists, and those interested in African American studies will be intrigued by Winch's research. * Library Journal * Throughout the history of European settlement in America, free people of color continually had to negotiate a challenging 'borderland' region between slavery and freedom. In this excellent summary, Winch provides a nuanced history of slavery that challenges traditional dichotomies of race and definitions of freedom. She examines slavery from the perspective of those on the fringes-from enslaved Africans in Montreal to a small number of African-born colonial slave owners, black Loyalists, mixed-race runaways in Florida, and men like Francis Johnson, an African American musician who toured extensively in Europe. After independence, although free people of color had achieved liberty, they never achieved full access to citizenship and equality as promised in the US Constitution. Well written and readily accessible, this book offers undergraduates and scholars alike an exceptional analysis of the complex definitions of race and freedom throughout early US history. Winch also provides primary source documents and images pertaining to slavery and freedom, as well as an informative short essay of suggested readings. Summing Up: Highly recommended. All levels/libraries. * Choice Reviews * In a very concise manner, Winch seeks to bridge the often divergent literatures about free people of color in the North and the South and construct a coherent narrative about people whom historians have generally examined through regional and community studies....Those familiar with Winch's scholarship on free people of color in Pennsylvania and the Midwest will likely find her most recent work stimulating. * Journal of Southern History * With the careful scholarship and insight we have come to expect from her, Julie Winch offers an illuminating synthesis of recent scholarship on African Americans' complex experiences with the meaning of freedom from their first arrival in North America to the era of emancipation. Surveying free African Americans' experiences in the North, South and West, Winch calls attention not only to blacks' hopes and the possibilities freedom might offer, but also the cultural contradictions and the social and legal limitations that made true freedom an elusive aspiration. Winch's well-conceived organization, crisp prose, and thoughtful selection of documents make this volume an extremely useful introduction for scholars and students alike. -- Mitch Kachun, Western Michigan University, author of Festivals of Freedom: Memory and Meaning in African American Emancipation Celebrations Since 1600, free people of color in North America paradoxically experienced the condition so central to their denomination in very crimped spaces. Yet, over time, they would prove critical not only in testing but in forging anew core values and aspirations apparently originating with more prominent white settlers and inhabitants of the vast continent-liberty, faith, equality, nation, improvement, fellowship and community. To investigate this protracted process is both daunting and disturbing. Julie Winch-a long lauded scholar of free blacks in the United States, especially its North-is uniquely fitted for the task. In this new volume, she makes the complicated and multifarious history of free blacks in North America accessible without so over-generalizing that the essential complexity of this history is washed-out. She does so both because of her evident gifts with prose and because of her encyclopedic familiarity with relevant sources from diverse times and places. No one else can speak of the breadth of this history with her authority. This book summarizes exactly why that is so. -- Peter Hinks, author of To Awaken My Afflicted Brethren: David Walker and the Problem of Antebellum Slave Resistance In the words of the old African American adage: 'Freedom ain't always free.' Even Blacks born free and those formerly enslaved who had somehow obtained their freedom lived in constant fear of being forcibly re- enslaved. For enslaved Africans, and for their free black sisters and brothers, Frederick Douglass said it best in 1852, some 75 years after patriots Thomas Paine and George Washington waxed eloquent: 'your denunciation of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery.' In Between Slavery and Freedom: Free People of Color in America From Settlement to the Civil War, Julie Winch has captured the essence of both Douglass' words and the Black liberation struggle. In so doing she has explored the true essence of freedom and its meanings: then and now. -- Maurice Jackson, author of Let This Voice Be Heard: Anthony Benezet, Father of Atlantic Abolitionism