
The Rising Generation chronicles the history of American emancipation through the cradle-to-grave experiences of a remarkable generation of Black New Yorkers. In this unique event, historian Sarah Gronningsater converses with legal-history scholar Kimberly White about her book.
Born into precarious freedom after the American Revolution and reaching adulthood in the lead-up to the Civil War, this “rising generation" ultimately played an outsized role in political and legal conflicts over slavery’s future, influencing both the nation’s path to the Civil War and changes to the US Constitution.
Through exhaustive research in archives across New York State, where the largest enslaved population in the North resided at the time of the American Revolution, Sarah L.H. Gronningsater begins by exploring how English colonial laws shaped late eighteenth-century gradual abolition acts that freed children born to enslaved mothers. The boys and girls affected by these laws were born into a quasi-free legal status. They were technically not enslaved but were nonetheless required to labor as servants until they reached adulthood. Parents, teachers, and mentors of this rising generation supported and founded schools, formed ties with white lawyers and abolitionists, petitioned local and state officials for better laws, guarded against kidnapping and cruelty, and shaped New York’s evolving identity as a free state. Gronningsater shows how, as the children of gradual abolition reached adulthood, they took the lessons of their youth into midcentury campaigns for legal equality, political inclusion, equitable common school education, and the expansion of freedom across the nation.